Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”
—The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley

Ultimately he chooses the second story window and his old room.

He had considered the front door, the kitchen courtyard, the attic roof. The kitchen had held the most appeal—the memories there were thick and fond, and it had been a lifetime since he had shared a meal with someone. But this is a thing that needs slowness, and he had felt things might move too fast if Alfred saw him first—if anyone but Bruce, with his glacier’s patience, saw him first.

The Cave had been his first, and worst, idea. Jason hadn’t been sure what he’d do if Tim Drake chanced into the Cave before anyone else. When he first came back to himself he had decided, after three days of incandescent rage, that he wasn’t going to be angry about any of this. Talia al Ghul wanted him angry. Bruce had discarded him for his anger. Willis had always been angry. Catherine had lived in fear of anger. So now here he is, not angry, sitting in his old room wearing stolen sweats and reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall while he waits for the door to swing open.

The pages of this copy of The Tenant are smooth and deckle-edged; it’s part of the box set of the complete Brontë sisters Bruce had bought for him his first Christmas here. Jason had lost his original copy of The Tenant, stolen from a library book sale when he was nine, sometime while he was on the streets. He’d mourned it, even though he’d already memorized half the book, even though the story already had taken on a life of its own inside his heart. The Tenant had been a comfort, a hard story with a soft ending—a mother who slammed a door in the face of a worthless husband, who found a better life for her son and a better love for herself. He’d never stopped feeling that stretched-thin longing that had swallowed him that first time he got to the end, not even after losing Catherine, not after meeting Bruce.

Now the words, familiar as his own name, march past him with the efficiency of ants, with the impartiality of a sewing machine needle stitching together two pieces of fabric. He looks up to watch the dust swirl in the dreary April light and Jason wonders if they ever dusted this place, after. He had done it himself when he had lived here before, defensive of having his own space. Had Alfred come in and dusted after, breaking a dead boy’s trust but keeping his memory clean—at least until the obligatory Dead Robin Mourning Period was over? Or had they shut and locked the door and never once thought about the grime piling up inside?

He can’t decide which option makes him feel worse. The whole of his second life has been like that—is this mausoleum of a room better or worse than if Bruce had thrown it all away? Is Dick moving back from Blüdhaven to train Tim Drake an honor to his memory or a slap in his face? Is it better that time moved on, or does he wish it had all ended with him? A or B? Forehand or backhand? Impossible to choose when all Jason wants is an option C: that none of this had ever happened at all.

The Lazarus Pit had ripped him apart and remade him three weeks ago. He’d spent the majority of the time afterward traveling from Geneva to Gotham, dodging Talia’s goons, Frontex, and, once he got back to the US, overzealous TSA agents. Talia had left him several thousand in marked euros, the clothes he’d worn into the Pit, and no ID. He hadn’t known where he was, hadn’t even known when he was. Talia had warned him against seeking Bruce out, told him he was unavenged, shoved a backpack filled with MREs and newspaper clippings proving her point into his arms, but otherwise—nothing. He’d spent most of his bleak, sleepless journey home practicing not being angry about that.

He reads more in The Tenant. The story unfolds and he is a distant observer. Gilbert accuses Helen of loving another man and Helen offers herself up in return, saying but would you be glad to discover I was better than you think me? Jason closes the book at that line, stomach twisting.

Shadows are starting to crawl across the floor as the sun sets. Bruce ought to be home by now. He’d made sure not to trip any of the alarms he knows about, but he’d not tried to dodge any of the CCTV cameras dotting the manor. The footage should’ve been flagged for review and Bruce should’ve reviewed it by now. Unless Bruce somehow didn’t notice or somehow didn’t care. Or none of this is real and Jason is a ghost, Jason is still dead, Jason is rotting underground and he is some Frankenstein’s monster with delusions of Jason Todd.

He swallows down a bubble of hysteria. Bruce will notice. Bruce will come. Maybe later than Jason wants him to, but what else was new?

He stands and moves through some light warm-up stretches. His body feels wrong after the Pit, like it should ache but doesn’t. His scars have faded to silvery nothings and the pain he had died with is only a hazy, smoke-smeared memory. He’s taller too, stronger than when he had died. He’s grown even in the past few weeks, stretch marks blossoming over his hips and across his back where his skin can’t keep up. He shaves every day, because if he doesn’t he ends up with stubble that ages him far past his nineteen years. Nineteen years. He had known his body so well, before. Now he wakes up every day in a strange man’s skin.

He kicks up into a handstand and walks the length of the room then back again. His shadow stretches long and strange across the polished oak floorboards and the tumbleweeds of filigreed dust. He tucks his head to his chin to look out the window. Sunsets in Gotham are beautiful in a way they aren’t anywhere else. It probably has something to do with the weird chemicals polluting the atmosphere. Fear gas and Ivy’s pollen and whatever aerosolized shit the Joker was pumping out of Ace Chemicals.

He drops to his feet. Another bruise he hadn’t known he had. He’s been finding a lot of them. Jason Todd, everyone. Murdered at fifteen and undone by a Gotham sunset.

It’s too dark to read now, and his joints ache with a sudden, unwanted insistence—wrists, fingers, ribs, skull. It’s cold, too. Or he thinks he’s cold. He used to run hot, cracking the window from late autumn through early spring when the Manor’s heat did its job a little too well. It’s a cool April night but not a cold one and he feels the oncoming night air in his bones. The Pit had healed everything, but he swears he can feel the half-healed fracture in his left femur, the hopelessly shattered metacarpals of his hands.

Talia had been thoughtful enough to include his autopsy report and he had been stupid enough to read it.

He considers turning the light on. It is almost completely dark now. But Alfred may get curious, or Tim Drake, if he’s around. How often is he around? Does Bruce sit with him while he does his homework in the library? Do they watch old movies together when the kid is sick? He’s done some research on Robin 3.0, new and improved edition. He knows he doesn’t live here—yet. His parents are dead but his uncle’s alive, and even then that’s a recent thing. Even when his parents had been alive they’d been obviously uninterested in their son’s continued health and safety if he’d had enough time to run off and play dress-up with Bruce every night. Poor little rich boy.

Jason catches the thought before it can go any further. It is dark and he is sitting on the bed that was once his, hands flat on his thighs to stop from clenching them. The digital clock on the bed stand blinks 88:88 over and over. Catherine had always been terrible at resetting the clocks after a power surge—or after Gotham electric had cut their power. Jason had had to steal her cellphone while she slept to get the correct time and then reset everything in the apartment. Bruce’s expensive Rolexes, with their dutifully-wound mechanical elegance, had seemed like a miracle when he first arrived.

He has no idea what time it is now. The digital clock blinks its nonsense time like a bomb that never finishes its countdown.

He closes his eyes and counts to 100, then 1,000. He tries reciting his favorite soliloquies, but the words squirm and tangle in his mind. He settles for his times tables, then powers of two, three, four. The moon rises, a hazy gibbous oval, and then sets. The numbers become too big to manage. He thinks he hears distant voices, but this wing of the house is too far away from the living areas for voices to carry. Maybe Talia sewed him together from the leftover parts of the Joker’s victims. Maybe he’s a disparate heart and liver and spleen, wrapped up in some eight-foot approximation of an adult Jason Todd. His brain is Jason’s, probably; it had been left in enough of a slurry to require a Lazarus Pit, and that tracks with the multiple skull fractures and their myriad brain bleeds from the autopsy report. Maybe he should have found a charming provincial Swiss family and squatted in some forgotten cupboard and watched them until he had learned to be human again.

His hands are too big and he has callouses he doesn’t remember earning and Bruce is never going to come and he is going to rot away to a vengeful spirit and the clock is blinking and light is cutting across the room from the hallway door’s sudden, violent swing open and it almost makes him hiss like an entirely different creature and then Bruce is there, there, there.

“Whatever you are,” Bruce’s voice is flat in the way it only gets when he’s furious; his face is inches away from Jason’s, “you will regret whatever game you’re playing.”

And Jason can’t help it. For the first time since he started breathing again, he laughs.

The Cave is colder than the old room, than the April night. It’s fifty-four degrees, like it always is, but he’s shivering in the darkened cell. Holding area. It’s not really a cell; it’s bigger than most bolt holes he’s hidden in since his return to consciousness. There’s a bed, a heaping of plush blankets, some recessed lighting, clean clothes. An ensuite bathroom, and he wasted no time scrubbing the travel grime off his skin during a scalding hot shower. But now his hair is wet and if he has access to climate control in the cell, he hasn’t figured it out yet.

It’s new, the cell. Bruce must’ve upgraded the old ones. Bruce had blindfolded and cuffed him when he’d brought him down to the Cave, even when Jason had testily explained that he knew the trick with the office, the clock, 10:48, and all that. Bruce hadn’t been impressed, had only removed the blindfold and the restraints when he’d deposited him in the opaque glass holding cell. He bets the walls of the cell could go clear if Bruce wanted. That seems like the kind of James Bond bullshit Bruce would love yet pretend was purely practical.

He runs his fingers over the smooth, cool glass of the cell wall, scuffs his bare feet over the rough stone of the floor. Bruce had taken his shoes as well as the pocket knife he’d swiped from a commuter venting his ire on a street vendor and the taser he’d brazenly lifted from a careless member of Gotham’s finest. He’d left him with the bat-issue version of hospital slipper socks, but Jason was feeling contrary about his own comfort.

Bruce had come in twice since he’d escorted him to the cell. Once to draw blood, take fingerprints, hair, urine, and some skin cells. A second time to draw more blood, carefully take dental impressions, and hand him a couple of fragile old paperbacks that had belonged to him before. Harder to brain someone than with a hardcover, he supposes.

He’d tried not to read too much into the selection, but getting handed Wuthering Heights, Crime & Punishment, and The Count of Monte Cristo feels like an omen even if they’re probably just the first paperbacks Bruce—or maybe Alfred—had seen. He wonders what happened to the copy of The Tenant he had been reading earlier that day—yesterday? He thinks he had left it on the bed, but he doesn’t feel sure.

He picks up Crime & Punishment and flips to the epilogue, Raskolnikov finding redemption and Sonya waiting, a proto happily-ever-after for which Dostoevsky’s critics had ripped him apart.

Jason had cried the first time he’d read that ending. He’d cried easily when he was younger, his emotions sweeping through him overstrong and sudden as a riptide. He’d learned to transmute a lot of his feelings into violence and the rest into a nervy kind of action—doing, rather than dwelling—because the men in his life didn’t cry. Willis and his buddies, Bruce and Alfred, the boys on the street and the men in the alleys; not even Dick Grayson, in his infinite emotional sensitivity, cried; especially not over things that weren’t even real.

But when Jason read about Raskolnikov and Sonya, or Mr. Darcy saying My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever, or Sydney Carton going to the guillotine in the stead of Charles Darnay, he’d felt a flush of emotion, a private spark of joy that he had felt too small to contain. The world had always been a broken, wretched thing, but someone, years ago, when the world was arguably even more wretched, had found some morsel of hope. When Jason had been young he’d been starving for hope.

Now, though. Now Jason finds himself agreeing with Dostoevsky’s critics. Who would wait that long for a murderer, and what would be left of him anyway? He flips back to the beginning of the book and starts reading from the beginning. He has to stop when Raskolnikov cuts down Lizaveta as collateral damage.

Another fucking bruise.

He sets the book aside and wonders if the books are maybe a kind of Rorschach test. He wonders if he’s passed or failed. He wonders how long it’s been since Bruce got confirmation it’s really him. If he did get confirmation. If it was really him. His dental records won’t match. He’s pretty sure the Pit regrew the two molars he’d lost in a bad fight against Two Face. At least the gap in the back left of his mouth that he’d gotten so used to prodding with his tongue is gone. He’s pretty sure the Pit restored his wisdom teeth too. His mouth feels overfull.

He’s going to be pissed if he has to have them out again. He decides right then he’s allowed to be pissed about that, at least.

“Fuck,” he breathes into the cool air. He flops back on the mattress. He is so tired. It has to have been at least a day since he’d crawled back to the Manor. Maybe his DNA hadn’t matched. Maybe Bruce was figuring out how to—what? Wipe his memories and throw him in Arkham?

He would rather die. Again. Actually, if he was a clone or a homunculus implanted with the real Jason Todd’s memories, did that actually count as dying?

“Fuck.” He turns himself onto his side. He wants his brain to be quiet. He hits the lights and tries to sleep.

He either sleeps or loses enough time for Bruce to be sure of something, because the next thing he knows the lights are brightening and the cell door is sliding open.

Bruce walks in. Jason is already on his feet. He waits, half caught between attention and half ready to run. It feels like his first days back at the Manor, Bruce stone-faced and uncertain, Jason waiting for the other shoe to drop.

They’d eventually worked it out, until it had all got tangled again.

But that had been another life.

“Jason,” Bruce says, and Jason can’t read the emotion in his voice. Bruce takes a step forward and Jason realizes with a start that there is gray at Bruce’s temples, lines around his eyes. That is wrong. It’s barely been—god. Four years.

Bruce reaches forward and Jason instinctively flinches back before catching himself. His muscle memory is fucked and he wonders again what had happened between his resurrection and the Pit. Before he’d died he had gotten to a place where a hug was more likely than a cuff, but that didn’t seem to be true anymore.

Bruce isn’t pulling him into a hug anyway. His hands rest on his arms, just below his biceps, holding him in place. “I mourned you,” he says. The words are either a confession or an accusation. “I mourned you.”

Jason has no response for that. He had played out Bruce’s first words to him again and again, the blame, the disgust, the rejection, and then, sometimes, when he was feeling sentimental, tears and warmth and muttered prayers about the miracle of his return. He had thought he was prepared for anything, ready to fight or flee if needed, ready to stay if desired, but the hollow emptiness in Bruce’s voice saps the nervous energy straight out of him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, because that is what he had come here to say. He’d been a bad Robin, a worse son. Not even a son, because no matter what the papers said, Bruce had once said he wasn’t Jason’s father and that had been a wound he’d carried with him ever since. He is sorry, he had failed, and ward or son, unavenged or not Jason had struck a bargain with himself—he will be better as long as he can have back a sliver of what he had lost. “Bruce, I’m so sorry.”

Bruce makes a noise that sounds like he’s been hit and then he is hugging him. Jason’s still shorter than Bruce, but it’s a matter of inches. Still, Bruce’s arms wrap around him, strong and implacable as an old growth forest.

“Oh Jay,” he says, and all the emotion that wasn’t there before is there now, boiling over, scalding them both. “Jay, no. Don’t be sorry. You came back and that’s what matters. You came back, son.”

Jason cries then, tears hot and wet and unstoppable as he buries his head in his father’s shoulder and promises that this time, this time will be different.

Chapter Text

Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Jason doesn’t know anything. That is the crux of it. That is what Bruce’s questioning reveals.

They are sitting in his bedroom. Alfred must’ve dusted while he was in the Cave; it’s immaculate here. There are clothes waiting for him in his new size—33” inseam, 31” waist, and a large t-shirt that hangs off his lean build. He’s 5’10” now, which is already two inches taller than he ever expected to be—the battery of nutritionists and endocrinologists Bruce had hired when he had first been adopted had been certain that childhood malnutrition would lead to him being small and thin the rest of his life. He’s probably not done growing. He’s going to be tall like Willis. But he’s also going to be tall like Bruce. He is going to be okay with that.

“What?” Jason asks. He had missed Bruce’s last question. There’s so much static in his head, there’s the hum of the space heater either Bruce or Alfred had added to his room. Could Bruce feel how corpse-cold he was when he had hugged him back in the Cave? Had his body still been warm when Bruce found him back then? Jason doesn’t know.

“What is the earliest thing you remember?” Bruce is a dog with a bone—if he doesn’t like the answer to a question he’ll come back to it again and again. He’ll ask it differently each time—sometimes slower, sometimes in different words, emphasizing different syllables, but the question is always fundamentally the same. As if he’s going to catch Jason in a contradiction. As if Jason’s misremembering how much he doesn’t remember. They’ve been at this three hours and Bruce is implacable in his repetition. He must be frustrated. Jason’s frustrated too.

“The Lazarus Pit,” Jason returns, mimicking Bruce’s slow, careful tones.

“So you returned to consciousness immediately once you were submersed?”

“Yes. It was like waking up on fire.” Or close enough; his memories of burning are hazy and vague, too many nerve endings set alight and smoke in his lungs. His memories of the Pit, in contrast, are startlingly clear, inescapable, a National Geographic documentary. Burning, but sour. Drowning instead of suffocating. The golden honey of the waters dyeing the world unreal. Too many thoughts crowding a head that had been empty for years and years and years.

“How long ago was the Pit?”

Jason doesn’t have an exact date. He was insensate with rage for three days according to Talia, but Bruce doesn’t consider Talia a reliable source and Jason probably shouldn’t either, though he can’t think of what reason she could have to lie about that particular detail. “It was April seventh, the first time I was able to check. But I don’t know how long that was after the Pit.”

It had been dizzying, the date—he had known, a part of him had known, but he still had managed to not really know. It’d been in downtown Geneva, on a bus tilting through neat Swiss streets, that he’d seen the newspaper. April 7, 2006. He’d been fifteen only a few days ago. It had been April 27, 2002 only a few days ago. He had lost time after that; not four year’s worth, but hours, too many. He’d come to in Bern, wearing different clothes, on a different bus. He hadn’t been able to keep food down that night.

“Walk me through after,” Bruce says, and Jason takes another ashy bite of Alfred’s pot roast and wishes he could’ve just made himself some goddamn rice and beans. He adds more salt and sticks to the facts.

“When you say you lost time between Geneva and Bern, was it like before the Pit?”

“I don’t remember either enough to say,” he says like he has said three times before. Bruce keeps circling the Pit, the before and the after, but there’s a special intensity to the way he talks about Jason’s before-the-Pit. Jason hadn't even had to share his observations about his twisted muscle memory for confirmation that whatever had brought him back to life hadn’t been the Pit itself. The Pit could only heal the living, or sometimes the recently deceased. Even assuming he had immediately come back to life post-burial, he had been dead for well over a week—transporting a corpse, especially internationally, especially one that was a victim of homicide, was a time-consuming ordeal, apparently. Bruce had shared the logistical details with apologetic detachment, and Jason, falling easily into his old role as protégé, had soaked them up like a sponge.

Bruce is exhuming his grave. Bruce is calling in Zatanna and Constantine and Jason Blood. Bruce is interviewing Oliver Queen and Superman and every revived hero he can think of—there are far more now than when Jason died, and he is absolutely not going to think about why he got a four year waiting period of walking catatonia and Green Arrow got a three month sabbatical in Heaven. The Flash—or one of them, they seem to have multiplied, so maybe an indefinite article was more appropriate here—will be coming by to examine him sometime, soon hopefully, because Jason doesn’t know shit.

“How did you feel when you—came back to yourself, as you put it.”

“Sick, scared, upset. I don’t know, Bruce. Is this actually helping you, or are you just trying to punish both of us?” he snaps, and Bruce’s expression tightens. Jason reminds himself of what is fast becoming a mantra: he will not be angry. He will be the son Bruce wants. He doesn’t know anything, and Bruce will have to learn to live with that.

“Okay, Jay. We can come back to that. Walk me through after?”

He closes his eyes and launches into the itinerary again. Across Geneva to Bern, then France, down to Madrid and south to Seville. Even further south in a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Rabat, Rabat to Cairo to Tel Aviv. A trip to Istanbul, a flight to London, the train to Cardiff, hiking Taff Trail to Brecon, then a series of trains and buses to Glasglow before flying transatlantic to Metropolis. Then, finally, the ferry to Gotham. He had barely slept and hadn’t stayed in one place longer than twenty-four hours.

“But Talia must’ve known you were coming here, right? She would have assumed as much.”

She had assumed as much. Do not seek him out, she had warned. You remain unavenged. “Probably,” Jason says.

“So why the roundabout trip?”

Jason doesn’t know! “I wasn’t thinking,” he says instead, when really his head had been so full of thoughts he had felt like it was going to split open. He wants Bruce to call him on the lie, to say Jason’s not the type to not think things like an international game of cat and mouse through, but he merely accepts Jason’s words with a hum.

“Why go to your room and wait like you did?”

There’s any number of true answers he could give, but his throat is dry from talking and Alfred’s food tastes like ash and Bruce has offered him hardly any answers of his own.

Jason grew up with a serial liar. Willis Todd had known that he himself wasn’t trustworthy; therefore, no one else was trustworthy either. He was always asking questions he already had an answer for, trying to catch Jason in a lie, trying to get Jason to confess to some perceived wrongdoing. He’d wait for Jason to fail to perform an act Willis had never actually asked him to perform, or he’d call Jason out for breaking a rule Willis had never actually articulated. Jason’s life had been a series of tests, and Jason had spent his early life studying for Willis’ tells.

Bruce had had his own tests, but he was always clear when Jason was being tested. In turn, Jason had promised himself he’d never be like Willis and his minefield of expectations. He had always tried to be honest with Bruce.

But there’s a hunch unfolding in the back of his mind and he finds himself laying out tests.

“I don’t know,” he lies.

He doesn’t know that Bruce has changed the shape and color of the bat symbol. He doesn’t know that Dick didn’t attend his funeral. He doesn’t know the Joker broke out of Arkham two weeks ago. He doesn’t know that every picture in the Manor that had him in it has been taken down. He doesn’t know he’s been replaced by Tim Drake. Bruce isn’t telling him any of it so he doesn’t know.

And the case in the Cave with his tattered Robin uniform and a plaque declaring him a good soldier? He doesn’t know about that either.

The next morning, Alfred knocks on his door to deliver a tray of breakfast foods, which is a thing that had never really happened before. As Jason takes the tray their eyes meet. Alfred hasn’t aged a day since he last saw him.

“I tried my hand at quesitos, Master Jason. I hope they will suffice.”

There’s more on the tray than the pastries, of course, because Alfred has always stressed a balanced breakfast. He steps back from the door and nods for Alfred to come in. He sets the tray on his bedside table and eyes the spread of food. Eggs scrambled with shrimp, tomatoes, peppers, and onions, mango sliced into neat cubes, crema de maiz topped with cinnamon and butter, black coffee with a dainty creamer of scalded milk in matching china, and of course the quesitos. It looks delicious and also like Alfred just decided to make everything straight out of the breakfast section of a Puerto Rican cookbook.

He sits and drags the tray into his lap. He goes for a quesito first, ignoring Alfred’s slight frown. The pastry is flaky and the filling is still a little warm, but the flavor is just—fine. Ashy, still. He wonders if that’s a side effect of—what, coming back to the Manor? Food hadn’t been this weird while he was on the run from the League; or he hadn’t noticed. But he can’t remember a meal tasting good now that he’s trying. He wonders if this is all his second life will be—finding another thing he’s lost everywhere he turns until there’s nothing left.

“It’s good,” he not-quite-lies, because if there wasn’t something wrong with him it probably would be. Better than the quesitos Catherine made; she always overcooked them and the pastry would end up brittle and sharp. My mamá would be so ashamed, she’d say, tears in her eyes, and Jason would eat them all anyway. Catherine would smile and wouldn’t try again until his next birthday. Rinse. Repeat. He had asked Alfred to help him try to make them for his next birthday—his sixteenth—though he’d never told him why. He’d asked Alfred for little enough that he must’ve guessed it was significant.

He’s going to fucking cry again, but Alfred saves him with a distant, melancholy smile and a crisp, “Very good, Master Jason.” He adds, “Leave the tray outside the door when you are finished and I shall retrieve it.” Then he leaves, shutting the door so gently Jason almost doesn’t hear it.

No one has told him he isn’t allowed to leave his room, but both Alfred and Bruce operate like they have. He is waiting for someone to explain.

He mechanically eats a breakfast of foods his mother never made for him. The clock on the bedside table ticks up another minute.

The next knock at his door reveals Bruce holding a tray of fancy sandwiches with sharp, bitter greens and cured meats he probably knew the name of once, all served with an acid vinaigrette that lingers unpleasantly on his tongue. Jason preferred the ash.

“I was thinking J’onn might be able to tell us something about your resurrection.” Bruce is doing his best approximation of casual, which is slightly more uptight than the personal Wayne banker who had opened Jason’s savings account all those years ago.

Jason doesn’t know anything and to Bruce that is unacceptable. There is only one right answer here and Jason’s already failed at this whole prodigal son thing because it’s not an answer he’s willing to give.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he announces, even though his hair is still damp from his post-breakfast shower and he’s been desperate for company all day. He misses Bruce like a phantom limb when they’re apart and he wants only to scream at him when they’re together. He is benched and Bruce is experiencing buyer’s regret and he stumbles when he stands because his legs are too long.

“Jay,” Bruce says, “I need to know.”

The floor beneath his bare feet is solid, cold, but Jason is insubstantial. Arrogant of him to think of Frankenstein’s monster, with its terrible solidity, its undeniable presence; Jason is a ghost. He could fall through the floorboards to the Cave, to the earth underneath. If he sank down far enough he might finally be warm. The earth’s mantle could boil what’s left of him away. A consummation devoutly to be wished. It’s not the first time he’s had this kind of thought, but it’s the first time it’s seemed—well. Is it death if you’re not really alive? It seems, to him, more like righting some cosmic wrong. There is, for him, no undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. He returned. He came back.

“When will the grave be exhumed?”

“They’re working as we speak.”

So it’s not in the Wayne family cemetery. Jason can’t quite see the plot from his window, but he would see anyone crossing the Manor grounds towards it. It’s probably the old Gotham cemetery, then. Do not stand at my grave and weep—but did anyone? He had tried not to think about it on his way back, had assured himself that, regardless of how it had ended, Bruce had loved him enough.

But belief does not supersede fact. He had been alive before the Pit and no one had noticed. How long had no one noticed? Maybe J’onn is the best choice—but no. Jason doesn’t want to know what ugly things he might dredge out of Jason’s brain.

He had four years, give or take, where his mind was not his own. That’s enough.

“I need to shower,” he repeats, and Bruce doesn’t stop him this time. Jason closes the door of the ensuite and throws the deadbolt Bruce installed just for him that first month at the Manor. Logically Bruce could get past it with minimal effort. Twelve-year-old Jason could’ve gotten past it with minimal effort. But the deadbolt on the ensuite door—and his bedroom door—are promises as much as they’re security measures. Bruce doesn’t break his promises.

Mostly.

Jason turns on the shower as hot as it will go and doesn’t shuck his clothes off until the mirror is fogged with steam and the room is so humid it’s hard to breathe. When he had first come to the Manor he had stuck to short, cold showers out of habit—when he’d paid the water and gas bills he’d always been trying to cut corners, and then he’d been sneaking into the Y once a week and—Alfred had suggested he was a reluctant bather as children, in his experience, tended to be. Bruce had apparently been perfunctory at best and Dick had almost seemed to glory in sweat and dirt. Jason had never found the words to explain the anxiety of an unaffordable utility bill, the choice between heat and water and electricity. He’d never found the words to explain the sharp fear of a stolen public shower or choosing whether to use the quarters he’d saved up for a trip to the laundromat or an extra meal. He’d never explained any of it.

But he had taken a hint and started luxuriating in long, hot showers.

Now he shampoos his hair, raking his fingers across his scalp. He needs a haircut. He probably can’t go back to the Park Row barber Bruce had found for him when he’d balked at the fancy Bristol salon Bruce favored. They had known him there as Bruce Wayne’s son.

God. Bruce had driven him across Gotham for a twelve dollar haircut because going somewhere local—and therefore expensive—had made him uncomfortable. Bruce had installed deadbolts on his doors without Jason even having to ask. There is an alternate explanation for the graveyard, just as there had been an alternate explanation for his bathing habits.

Bruce had loved him. Whether he still can is something else entirely.

He rinses his hair and then starts scrubbing at his skin with the rough loofah twelve-year-old Jason had initially eyed skeptically but quickly grown to love. He had inventoried his scars several times over—twice with Bruce and once before, on his own.The Pit hadn’t wiped them away, for which he is grateful, but it had faded them to silvery memories, which is almost worse. The puckered bullet wounds, the round cigarette scars, the deep knife wounds and surgical scars that had required stitches and weeks to heal—the topography of his skin has been transformed, made smooth and even and new. And then there are the marks he doesn’t recall. Blunt force trauma and smoke inhalation don’t scar, but he can feel faint seams in his skull like the sections of a peeled orange, can trace the memory of an autopsy scar on his chest, can feel the texture of short, thick scars on his fingertips. The weals from some sort of lash and the clean, thin scars from a sharp blade speak of time spent somewhere unkind, likely with the League. So many memories, all of them foreign.

Jason scrubs his skin harder, the heat and friction sloughing off more skin than strictly necessary. He’s pale, always has been, and the exfoliation leaves angry red marks on his skin. In the sun he’ll tan, skin darkening to a golden brown that isn’t too far off from Dick’s natural olive tones. He had tried to keep a tan, to look as much like Dick as possible, like Robin never changed. But after—whatever he’s been through, he’s paler than Bruce. The veins in his forearms stand out against lean muscle and when he turns his arm over he can see the delicate blue webbing of his wrist, can feel his pulse kicking sluggishly in the meat of his thumb, against the side of his neck.

He jerks the water off and almost jumps out of the shower. His shampoo clatters to the tile and he doesn’t pick it up, doesn’t bother to towel off, just tugs his old clothes back on over his terribly present, still-dripping body and throws open the door, the comforting steam of the bathroom having become suffocating.

Bruce is gone, but there’s a woman in his place, square-jawed, her bright red hair flat-ironed into a neat shoulder-length bob. She is sitting at his desk—or no, near his desk, in a wheelchair. She’s wearing chunky plastic frames in a dark gray and a crisp, professional button-up. She looks absolutely nothing like the Barbara Jason had known, like she had tried to sever her past self from her present by completely refashioning her appearance. Her gaze is coolly professional even as she smiles at him. “I saw you were alive,” she says, “and I decided to come see for myself.”

“You saw?” He says dumbly.

Her smile widens, and there’s something of her old Batgirl mischief in it. He had never thought he’d see that again. He hadn’t been sure he’d ever see her again. Last he’d checked she wasn’t taking visitors at the hospital—not even Dick, and certainly not him. “I see everything,” and coming from anyone else it’d be a hollow boast but she says it with such absolute confidence that Jason believes her. “I’m Oracle.”

The name is supposed to mean something, but Jason doesn’t know what. Barbara’s always been a little like this—she’s on her own wavelength and if you can’t keep up then that’s your problem, not hers. Jason had always welcomed the challenge but now it’s all he can do to swallow down his frustration and say, “Are you more of a Delphi or a Sibylline oracle?”

Barbara laughs like he’s said something funny. “Neither. I watch Gotham and guide her vigilantes. I took it up after.”

She doesn’t specify what her after is, doesn’t need to. It hangs unspoken between them, Barbara’s after, and Jason feels a moment of genuine, profound affinity that he has to force himself to swallow, to unhook himself from the emotion caught in his throat and keep going. “Watch how?”

“Cameras. Gotham has an extensive CCTV system, and I can hack into nearly all of them. Digital records too—Wayne Enterprises is sponsoring a huge digitization push, especially in the medical field. Phone lines also, as well as traffic cameras and most wireless systems, that sort of thing. I mostly do support and research. Sometimes—well. Justice can be delivered in many ways.”

“So you’re Big Brother.”

She laughs like he’s said something funny again. “In a sense.”

Willis had a buddy named Ronny who mostly hung around to lose at poker and occasionally fix their vacuum cleaner or their ancient microwave. He’d been one of Willis’ most tolerable friends, had taught Jason how to do an oil change and tire rotation on the clunky station wagon he’d driven around Park Row. Taught him how to repair the toaster oven and their tiny CRT, how to prepare for a global food shortage by buying up low-cost shelf-stable foods. He was the kind of guy who believed that the CIA controlled all of Gotham’s rogues, thought the aliens built the pyramids, owned neither a cellphone or a landline, and always paid cash. He’d lost his job as a HVAC tech about a year before Willis went to prison for good. Jason had seen him when they were both living on the streets. Ronny had grown gaunt, lost teeth. He’d looked straight at Jason and hadn’t recognized him and when Jason had tried to share half his sandwich with him he’d knocked it to the ground and lunged at Jason with a crackling, high-pitched scream.

Jason knows their job isn’t one where they can afford to be precious about personal privacy, and he can’t say he’s ever been terribly invested in the rights of criminals, but he’s imagining Babs watching him through every camera on the street and he feels the same kind of primal shriek Ronny had let out when he had confronted him building in his own throat.

“That’s great, Barbie.” He moves his mouth and the words come out and they’re gibberish; they don’t mean anything.

“Jason,” she says, and there’s a warmth there that wasn’t there before. “I came because I wanted to show you something.” She pulls a tablet out of her purse. He’d never owned a tablet. They’d seemed clunky and redundant when compared to the elegant top-of-the-line laptop Bruce had given him. But the machine in Barbara’s hand is wafer-thin and futuristic. She tilts it so they can both see the screen. It’s grainy CCTV footage of some dead-end in the East End. It could even be Crime Alley. Something curdles in Jason’s stomach.

“Bruce interviewed the cemetery workers personally last night, and from there we were able to determine a rough window for your resurrections. There’s a strange gap—I’m still running some algorithms against reports of John Does in Gotham’s medical facilities—but then, after a few months, there’s this.”

She hits play and there he is—not how he remembers himself exactly but more how he remembers himself than how he is now—slight, shorter than average. He can’t make out much but he knows his body. He had trained in front of the wall of mirrors in the Cave too often not to. He looks thin as he slips behind the dumpster. But when the thugs drag a woman into the alley and he leaps out and makes quick work of them, there’s sharp lines of anger in his movements too.

“I don’t remember this,” he says. There is no sound on the video and his voice seems to come from very far away.

“This was September 15, 2003. It’s one of those little offshoot alleys off Long St, in Crime Alley. I’ve found eleven more videos, some more exciting than others.” She swipes to the side and a new video pops up.

“No.” His voice is tinny, hard to hear over the ringing in his ears. He is not supposed to be angry, but anger is a flame licking at his insides, setting his emotions on a slow, inevitable simmer. He doesn’t know why.

Barbara frowns at him. “Then just the most recent one. Maybe it will jog your memory.” She swipes a few more times and then hits play.

“I said no.”

Barbara pauses the video. She looks at him seriously over the rims of her glasses. “Is it the video that’s upsetting you?”

He doesn’t know. He closes his eyes and tries to sort through the noise in his head. The worst thing about the video is watching his body do something he doesn’t remember, but nothing about the content is, strictly speaking, objectionable. Sure he’s back on the streets, but he isn’t stealing or—well, he’s being some kind of hero. Stopping muggings or worse kinds of violence. Insensate, dumb, but proving himself again and again and again. “How long? How long was I on the street?”

“The earliest video I can find is from July 21, 2003. The latest is May 2, 2004. So about ten months, give or take.”

Ten months. Babs hadn’t been Oracle or whatever then, so there had been no one to look for him. There was no way Bruce could have known that he was—not alive, but moving. Breathing, at the very least. “Okay,” he says. “Show me what you got.”

His body again—thinner now, moving through the streets. The camera angles shift as Barbara knits disparate footage together. He doesn’t move with any swiftness—there is no purpose in his steps. He thinks of Ronny’s blank gaze. Maybe this is the truest version of himself, the fate written into his bones. Child of criminals and addicts, meant to starve on the streets. The video footage lingers on his form as he vaults the edge of a dumpster. His hands fumble through crumpled newspaper and bloated plastic bags until he finds something edible and then he eats, methodical, blank, and he doesn’t remember this but he remembers this. He was smaller and hunger was always gnawing a hole in his stomach and he vomited up so much food before he learned to chew carefully and swallow in tiny, measured bites.

He had left that in the past when he had come to the Manor, but the body apparently never forgets. He chews and swallows and chews and swallows and suddenly he has to know what other ugly details of his once-and-future past Babs and Bruce are going to be poring over.

“Show me the rest.”

Babs cuts a look at him and there’s concern in her eyes now. “Jay,” she says, like she’s sorry, like she can take back the violation of knowing, of seeing everything.

“Barbara.” He meets her eyes. He doesn’t know what she sees. He’s never been great at showing people the right parts of himself at the right time. He doesn’t know what he’s showing her right now at all. He’s watching his body perform desperation on a screen while a woman he used to know watches him watching himself. Formulated, sprawling on a pin. He is a thing to dissect, a body post-mortem. Not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.

He isn’t angry anymore, he doesn’t think. There’s that.

Barbara hands him the tablet and explains the touch controls to him. The tablet is feather-light, even as it takes him some time to get the hang of the gestures. His fingertips are rough, oddly scarred and calloused, and his hands are clumsy, over-large. He probably doesn’t have the fine motor control required to change a tire, let alone repair a complicated appliance. He probably didn’t when he was brain-dead on the streets either. He’s not sure how he survived—muscle memory only goes so far. He presses play.

He watches in reverse order, figuring that if he had resorted to anything truly heinous it’s more likely to have happened when he was hungriest. It’s more of the same—eating trash and scurrying from street to street. One video is six hours of him curled up in the entrance of the defunct metro stop at Shelby and Thirty-First. He skims through it and aside from noticing he starts awake every fifteen minutes to look around there’s nothing remarkable about it. He steals food from a bodega or two and shares his spoils with whoever’s around—sometimes street kids, sometimes thugs. He doesn’t seem to have the higher brain functions necessary to distinguish the two. He fights whoever gives him trouble and he’s not always careful. He remembers none of it except in the way he remembers how exactly alike it all is to his time before Bruce.

He gets to the end and starts watching again. Barbara says something, but he only hears sound, not words. This time he doesn’t fast forward through the video of his body sleeping. There’s nothing special about him—not like this, on the street. There’s enough other itinerants, other homeless, in these videos, that he knows his suffering is not unique. None of his suffering ever had been, not really. Still, watching it laid out like this, through the lens of a camera—

Somewhere he’s still the detective Bruce made of him, able to appreciate the evidence compiled so neatly here, but right now all he can feel is violation. He never wanted to see himself like this again. He never wanted anyone in his new life to see him like this.

And, oh. He is still angry. He is furious. His rage has just grown so large he couldn’t see it, a rogue wave rearing up above a city, an entire coastline, about to crash down and destroy, destroy, destroy.

“Get out,” he says to Babs, not seeing her. He shoves the tablet back into her hands.

“We should talk,” she says, and how could Jason have forgotten how stubborn she was? Enough to remain unyielding in the face of Bruce’s disapproval, to be Batgirl despite the odds against her. Enough to completely remake herself into something else entirely. Barbara Gordon is obdurate as stone, but Jason is terrible with rage.

“I don’t remember any of it,” and his own voice hurts his ears, his words scrape out of his throat. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing. I only remember dying—I only remember being hit again and again and again. I only remember heat and smoke and knowing what was going to happen. I remember the Pit and I remember the weeks it took to get back here and being hungry and scared and confused. I don’t remember anything else. I don’t remember starving, or fighting, or stealing, and I’m glad I don’t. I’m so fucking happy that I don’t, because I have enough memories of that already.” He’s screaming, and his voice is so deep, exactly like Willis’ and when did his voice get so deep? It was still breaking a couple weeks ago, Dick mocking him during a rare Nightwing and Robin team up and Jason had hated the lower register his voice was falling into but he hadn’t minded how he sounded when Dick made him laugh.

But now he sounds like Willis and the one time he had managed laughter it had been an acrid, unkind sound.

“I hate this,” he says, and he isn’t talking to Barbie or to Bruce or to anyone at all. “I hate this.” He needs movement. He has been standing still too long. HIs hands are in fists and he wants to hit something, wants to feel something give beneath his fists—wood or bone, it doesn’t matter. He turns and blindly slams a hand into the wall and the plaster gives, flaking away. The plaster was always shabby and flaky in the apartments he lived in with Catherine and Willis. He punches the wall again and again and again until the drywall gives beneath his fist, until he’s up to his wrist in broken wall, and he’s screaming, wordless now, angry just like Willis got angry.

He hadn’t hit Barbara, even though an ugly part of him maybe wanted to, maybe wanted her to feel some fraction of the ugliness ripping him up inside. Willis had only ever hit him once. It had bruised ugly despite the frozen vegetable medley he’d iced it with. Willis hadn’t been able to look him in the eye for days afterward, and once the swelling had gone down and the bruise had faded to a blotchy yellow he’d sat Jason down and promised he’d never lay a hand on him again.

Willis had made a lot of promises like that. He was going to stop drinking, he was going to go straight. He wouldn’t gamble, not even low-stakes poker with the boys. He’d stop hanging around Darrell, who’d gotten mean after his big stint in prison. He’d be a better husband, a better father. He wouldn’t speak to Catherine like that, would take Jason to a baseball game, would take them both on vacation—Atlantic City, Coney Island, Disneyland. Willis always seemed to believe it when he said it, and when Jason felt like being fair he did seem to try, but give it long enough and Willis was at it again—drinking, screaming, breaking things that they couldn’t afford to have broken.

Maybe Willis would’ve kept that promise. Maybe Willis never would’ve hit Jason again. They’d never had a chance to test that particular promise out. Willis was in jail two months later and Jason never saw him again. Jason had made himself his own promise—that he wouldn’t be anything like WIllis Todd, but now he is here, lying and testing and hitting things when life didn’t go his way, so maybe his inability to keep a promise was another way he and Willis were inextricably alike.

He puts a second hole in the wall. Chips of the deep forest green paint Jason had chosen for his room are flaking off onto the floor and the air is hazy with plaster dust. He needs to get himself under control. This is exactly why Bruce wants to bench him. The veneer of respectability he’s worked so hard on is starting to peel away, revealing the hateful, rotting thing beneath, the doomed piece of shit interchangeable with any other doomed piece of shit on the street, fished out of a gutter to strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then fail. Not even fail spectacularly, like some great tragedy. To fail in the banal, everyday ways people like him always fail—angry, reckless, stupid, forgettable. The veneer is peeling away and Bruce can see it and he is going to lose Robin, the thing that transformed him into something greater than himself and he’ll just be Willis Todd’s boy again.

“—son,” someone says, and it’s loud, bellowing over his own rabid-animal howls. It’s so loud. “Jason Peter Todd. Look at me.”

There are hands around his wrists—Bruce’s hands, not able to circle his wrists like they used to, when he was—oh. He is on the floor. Barbara is gone. His feet are cold. He has already lost Robin. He is never going to be Robin again. He was benched. He was fired. It is done. It’s done.

The sounds coming from his mouth choke off into coughs. Bruce stops saying his name. The quiet almost hurts. His knuckles are bleeding and clogged with plaster and paint chips but they don’t hurt, or they hurt in a way that transcends pain. He felt whole when he was hitting the wall, which can only mean ugly things for him. He had promised. God, he had promised.

“Jason.” Bruce’s brow is furrowed with concern but also trepidation. His eyes are so light, almost colorless, like if you looked hard enough you could see to the very bottom of Bruce Wayne. Had Bruce’s eyes always been so pale? “Is it the Lazarus Pit?”

That, more than anything, startles Jason back into the present. “What does the Pit have to do with anything?”

Bruce shifts out of his crouch to sit cross-legged across from Jason. Jason mirrors his position before he realizes he’s doing it. They’ve done this so many times before, usually on the mats down in the Cave. Jason’s told Bruce so many secrets with them sitting like this. He wonders if the pose is intentional, meant to encourage Jason to let down his guard. He immediately reprimands himself for the thought.

“The Lazarus Pit,” Bruce says slowly, ordering his thoughts even as he speaks, “has certain side effects. You might even say it extracts a price. The Lazarus Pit can, at its very worst, completely transform a person. My understanding is that Ra’s himself is an example of that. It can cause certain disruptions to emotional processes. Outsized rage. Paranoia. Hallucinations, generally auditory ones. Such side effects are usually temporary and certainly manageable with treatment. I was wondering if what just happened might have been a result of the Pit.”

Jason pulls his knee back just a centimeter, enough that it’s no longer touching Bruce’s knee. “You think I’m insane.”

“No,” Bruce says firmly. “I think going through an experience like the Lazarus Pit is a traumatic experience and you may be contending with some nasty side effects.”

Jason swallows down his instinctive retort. Consider all the evidence. The Pit had hurt. That is a true thing. It had hurt more than dying, maybe because dying had ended in nothing and the Pit had rocketed him back to full consciousness. He had come out swinging, but Jason had always come out swinging, ever since Willis’ buddy O’Connor had taught him how to throw a punch. Afterwards, after his three days or whatever, he had mostly felt numb, confused. He’d felt other things too as he’d tried to piece together his whens and wheres and hows, but nothing that had seemed foreign to him.

Not that he’ll know, if he is insane. He doesn’t feel all that different from how he felt before and he suspects that’s a big part of the problem, but he can’t get angry at Bruce for not holding back the passage of time.

“It wasn’t the Pit,” he says. He isn’t certain but he tries to sound like he is—Bruce responds better to certainty.

“Then what was it?” and Jason doesn’t want to say. His anger is curled up heavy in his chest now and he is going to keep it there. He is not going to have another episode. He is not going to break his promise. He is not going to be Willis’ boy. He is not going to let down Bruce. He isn’t Robin but he is home and that has to be enough.

“It’s just a lot,” is all he can offer Bruce, and Bruce’s lips tighten, his brow remains furrowed, and maybe it’s better if Bruce thinks it’s the Pit and not just Jason furious, terrified, grieving. If it happens again he’ll have an excuse (though it won’t happen again).

The clock on his nightstand tells him it’s almost 4:00 PM. The last Jason remembers it was barely noon. Jason stares at the square red numbers until 3:56 becomes 3:57. He looks back at Bruce, whose face is granite. Bruce was never quite so controlled, before. At least Jason doesn’t think he was. 3:58. The numbers are going up.

“I think,” Jason says, “I need to be alone. Just for a while.”

Bruce nods, slow. Steady. A glacier’s patience he had thought, but Bruce could put the passage of millennia to shame. “I’ll come back in an hour or so?”

“Sure,” Jason says. “Sounds good.”

Bruce leaves him then, and Jason crawls into bed and counts his breaths and watches the clock numbers tick up, up, up.

Chapter Text

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

Dirt gets in his mouth and he swallows, gasps another heaving breath only for more dirt and something writhing, twitching, alive to fall in too. Dirt is everywhere, in his nose, his eyes, under his nails. Something else under his nails too—something hard, sharp, unforgiving. His hands are claws and he scrapes them along the weight above him—dirt, more of it, under his collar, against his skin. He wants to scream but whenever he opens his mouth it’s just dirt. He gasps. He wakes up.

He’s in his bed at the Manor and it’s plaster and drywall in his mouth, in the dried blood smeared along his knuckles, under his nails. Bruce is standing in the doorway but not coming in.

“It’s been an hour,” Bruce says. The clock tells him it’s 4:50, but Jason will give him a pass.

“How long have you been standing there watching me sleep, old man?”

Bruce has no shame about him. “You were having a nightmare. Not screaming, but—”

“Haven’t you watched enough of my unconscious body?” Jason tries for light, teasing. He used to make Bruce laugh, he remembers. But Jason’s voice is deep, his tone is sharp, and Bruce only frowns.

“I apologize for violating your privacy like that, Jason. I was concerned.”

Jason looks down at his hands. They’re filthy, and his clothes are filthy too, and that means the sheets are filthy as well. He’s going to need a third shower today. There’s a joke here, about puberty and hormones. It’s probably even a funny one. “It’s fine.” He draws his knees up to his chest and pats the bed. “You wanted to talk. Let’s do it.”

But Bruce just frowns more deeply. “A moment,” he says, then disappears.

Jason is still blinking at the doorway when Bruce returns, a small stainless steel bowl clasped in his big, big hands and a first aid kit tucked under his arms. He sits on the bed and Jason holds out his hands for Bruce to examine without him even having to ask.

“I should have done this before I left,” Bruce says, enough self-recrimination in his tone that Jason has to fight back an eye roll.

“I know how to throw a punch, B,” he says, and he’s fifteen again, sitting in the Cave, and Bruce is about to tell him it’s not about protecting his hands, it’s about excessive force, what’s gotten into you, Jason, why are you so angry?

But Bruce just hums and pats at his junked-up knuckles with a lukewarm washcloth. “You do. That wall never had a chance.”

Jason glances towards the wall, with the three new holes he recently renovated into it. He doesn’t remember the third one at all. It’s low, like he was on his knees when he made it. He looks away, face hot. “Sorry,” he mutters.

Bruce shakes his head and starts picking out little splinters of plaster, crumbled dust of drywall. Blood starts to run down his knucks again, but clean this time. “At least you chose the wall from the bathroom reno. Most of the Manor is brick under this plaster. You’d have broken your hand.”

He’d have deserved to, throwing a temper tantrum like that. Bruce bandages up his knuckles, then runs the washcloth along his fingers with long, careful strokes. Jason wonders if Bruce washed his body like this after the warehouse, if he scrubbed the detritus out from under Jason’s nails, if he tried to set his broken fingers. Jason had always been fastidious, especially about his hands. Bruce would’ve known that. Bruce would’ve—

“When I found Catherine, after she OD’d that last time, I washed the vomit from her face,” he says. “She had always hated it when she didn’t look put together. Even at her worst, if she went out, she’d try to—she'd try to do her hair, her makeup, that sort of thing. I brushed her hair too.”

Bruce stops washing and curls his hands around Jason’s. Their hands are about the same size. Bruce’s are broader in the palm, but otherwise there’s not much difference. “Jason, I don’t think you actually want to talk about this.”

“I still have plaster under my nails.”

Bruce produces a nail brush from nowhere. “Would you like me to do it, or would you prefer to do the honors?”

Jason takes the brush from Bruce and starts scrubbing his nails clean. He’s not as gentle as Bruce was, but the sensation is grounding. He scrubs a little harder. “You wanted to talk.”

Bruce sighs and runs a hand through his hair. The cowlicks that must’ve haunted Alfred when Bruce was a kid take the gesture as encouragement to run wild, and Jason manages a wan smile. “About the Lazarus Pit,” Bruce begins, and Jason’s smile is gone as suddenly as it had come. “I believe you. But I do need you to be cognizant of atypical behaviors. We still don’t know how—”

“Didn’t you exhume the grave? Today? Did that tell you anything?”

Bruce has never liked being interrupted, but the sour expression he makes, the dip between his brows and the slant of his mouth, seems more severe than deserved. “That told me nothing about how or why.”

“But it did tell you something.”

When Bruce was training him they would talk through cases like this and Bruce had never liked being interrupted, but he’d always seemed pleased when Jason was curious, when Jason caught a fact being held back or a contradiction in logic. Bruce doesn’t seem pleased now. “Yes.”

He doesn’t elaborate and even in the mystery of Jason’s own resurrection, Jason is apparently not going to be an equal partner. Bruce isn’t supposed to be like this. Bruce wasn’t like this. He feels emotion building in him again but this time it isn’t anger; this time it’s sucking and cold, like the mud at the bottom of Gotham Harbor.

Talia told him he shouldn’t come back here. Maybe he should have listened for once in his life.

He tilts his head up at the ceiling. Dick’s room had had those plastic stars stuck on the ceiling, but Jason had hated how tacky they looked and had kept his own ceiling pristine, blank. Dick had always loved tacky things, had embraced kitsch with a kind of unselfconscious joy that Jason had hated him for. He closes his eyes and swallows, checks the time before he looks back at Bruce. It’s 4:58.

“I dug out,” he says.

“You remember?”

He doesn’t. He hopes he never does. “I guessed.” He holds his newly clean hands out for Bruce to examine, tilts them so the scars on his fingertips catch the light. “You know how your nails get weird when your diet’s bad? About half my fingernails show that—must’ve been when I was on the street. The other ones are all thick and healthy. I think the Pit regrew them. I think a lot of them got ripped out when I dug out.” He presses down on his ring finger with his thumb, watches the nail go white, the blood rush back when he lets go. Still alive.

“You didn’t tell me,” Bruce says, and there’s a reprimand there.

“I didn’t think I needed to. I didn’t want to—” he waves his hand a few times, like he could snatch the right words out of the air, “to contaminate the evidence with conjecture. You cataloged my scars and performed all sorts of tests on me. I’m sure the data is all there.”

Bruce’s expression is dark, not quite a thundercloud but a quickly oncoming storm. “How am I supposed to unravel this mystery if you, as the primary witness, refuse to cooperate.”

And that’s rich coming from a man who’s shared precisely nothing about his investigation into the resurrection and nothing about his life in general. “Maybe it’s not a mystery we’re supposed to understand!” His voice is loud, not quite a shout but too close. Jason swallows and presses his index finger to his thumb and then lets go. Press, count to ten, let go. Repeat. “Maybe,” he tries again, “this isn’t a thing we get to know.”

Bruce draws his lips back, bares his teeth in a grimace. “I’m not one for superstition—”

“I came back from the dead—”

“There has to be a logical explanation—”

“Why isn’t it enough—”

“I can’t lose you again,” Bruce thunders and Jason flinches at the sound. “If this is temporary I need to know. If I’m going to wake up one morning and find you dead in this room I need to be prepared for that. If there’s any chance—”

“There’s always a chance,” Jason snaps. “That’s how this works. Sometimes you wake up and find that someone you cared about died in the night and there is no warning or reason. I’m right here, Bruce. Are you going to keep pretending I’m not?”

“You don’t understand what it was like to lose you.”

And he doesn’t. He never will. Bruce lost him and mourned him and maybe bargained for another day with him, maybe visited his grave and wept, maybe ripped himself open on the streets of Gotham, hemorrhaging out all the warmth and understanding he’d held back those last months of Jason’s first life. The Bruce in front of him now isn’t the Bruce who lost. He’s scar tissue, knotted and ugly but healed. Jason is a rainy day pulling at an old wound. Jason is a haunting.

He had never liked zombie movies. Dick, when he was around, had taken a certain delight in the cheesy practical effects. They had both enjoyed critiquing the accuracy of the gore, but the concept itself had fallen flat. The horror of your loved ones coming back, mindless and rotting—a cynical part of him hadn’t thought that it would matter that much. Catherine-as-a-zombie and Catherine-on-a-bad-day, Willis, mindless and bumbling through the apartment searching for brains or Ibuprofen—the difference is negligible.

Would it be different if he had stumbled back to the manor catatonic, a zombie instead of a ghost? Zombies don’t have bad days and don’t bellow like their dead criminal fathers. Zombies can’t be uncooperative witnesses; their bodies either tell their stories or don’t. Would it be easier to have been lost if he didn’t know he had been lost?

Because he had been. His blindly shambling body starving on the streets of Gotham had been proof enough of that. He’d been lost and then stolen and then come back to life and Bruce looks at him like he’s a ghost and sooner rather than later he will become one—a madwoman in the attic while Tim Drake, orphaned at seventeen, settles into his role as Bruce’s newest son.

“What are you thinking?” Bruce asks when the silence grows too great. Before, when Bruce had asked him what he was thinking it had been a question that wanted an answer. He had thought Jason mattered, had wanted to know him. Now, voice soft and almost hesitant, it’s a question meant to soothe—like Jason is a feral animal that might bolt, like Jason is a ghost that might dissipate on a stiff breeze.

“All life’s a game, Bruce,” he tells Bruce, the same way he told him a month or four years ago. Bruce blinks as he places the words, then blanches. Jason wonders if Bruce memorized their last interactions, pressed them between the pages of his mind like old flowers, wonders if he pored over them again and again, missing him the way Jason missed Catherine, the way Bruce missed Thomas and Martha.

Obviously not. Catherine has never healed for Jason, and Thomas and Martha are a raw, bloody wound for anyone to see. Jason is scar tissue. Jason is a ghost.

“It’s getting late,” Jason announces. It wasn’t even 5:15. “Do you still nap before patrol?”

Jason had hated Bruce’s pre-patrol naps, had wanted to badger Bruce with facts he learned in social studies or run through the latest drills they’d practiced that weekend, but Bruce had needed the precious time to rest and it had given Jason time to do his homework. “I still nap before patrol,” Bruce says. “Longer, now that there’s no hellion clambering into my bed to recite lines from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.”

“Alfred said it was good for my diction.” He stood, a little unsteady on his feet, and offered Bruce his hand. Bruce takes it and Jason tries not to think about how he’s less than a head shorter than Bruce. Or how Bruce moves a little stiffly, like his lower back pains him.

“Alfred did not tell you to practice your diction at six in the evening while jumping on my bed.”

“How else to experience Jellicle Cats are roly-poly/They know how to dance a gavotte and a jig? But no. He always sternly reprimanded me for such infractions.” He can feel his accent start to slip into stuffy received pronunciation and shrugs his too-broad shoulders. “Let me know when you get home? I worry for you alone out there.”

It sours in his in his mouth even has he says it—the lie, like how Catherine would ask Willis where he was last night even though she knew he’d been out with breaking windows with Two-Face’s gang, like how Willis would ask Jason how he’d come by the wad of cash Jason had offered him when he’d known damned well Jason had pawned a watch he’d lifted, like how Jason would ask Catherine when she was coming to the school play even though he knew, he knew, he knew. They all told each other lies and caught each other in them and here is Bruce and here is Jason and the same pattern he’d left behind but not really, because it was imprinted in his dirty DNA.

“I’ll be fine,” Bruce doesn’t lie but omits, and did Bertha struggle to get Rochester to admit Jane slept below in the manor proper, beautiful and beloved? Or did she find Jane one night curled up in her bed, unspoiled and lovely and small in the flickering light of her candle, and know that the man who should have loved her had replaced her without a word. “I have Alfred in the Cave and Oracle on comms.”

“Right,” he says. “Oracle. That’s something else.”

Bruce smiles with fondness, pride. “Barbara really rebuilt herself from the ground up. It took her a while to find her way, but she came back stronger.”

The metaphor hangs heavier than Damocles’ sword between them. Bruce always did love a good didactic fable, and one made of blood and flesh was even better. He doesn’t think of the case in the Cave. He does think of being found, being remade stronger than ever. “Still,” he says. “Check in with me?”

“Of course, Jay.” Bruce turns to go and for a moment it seems like he might say something else but then he is gone and Jason is alone and it is 5:33 PM.

He strips the bed, wadding the dirty covers up and shoving them in the corner. He runs through light stretches, push ups, sit ups, deeper stretches that pull at his muscles, pull ups, reads the first six chapters of A Wrinkle in Time which he never liked and still does not. Then: some light cardio, three sun salutations, the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, and the first book is called “Recalled to Life,” how could he have forgotten? More yoga, his three favorite soliloquies from Shakespeare which were really Dick’s three favorite soliloquies, fifteen minutes of shavasana, a list of reasons to stay, the first section of Beowulf in Old English which he once memorized for extra credit even though he doesn’t know what any of the lines mean, then catching the clock flicker from 6:59 to 7:00 and he feels frustration, swift-footed and overwarm, flood his body. Hwæt! Hwæt! That meant something. Lo, behold, thus, indeed—a cry for attention.

Hwæt! He is a ghost haunting a forest green room and he’s been dead for four years. He feels something coming to a rolling boil within himself. Willis would break something. Catherine would shoot up. Bruce is probably getting ready to go out as a dress-up vigilante and punch people like Jason’s parents. Sheila would probably have a smoke and let whatever happens happen—que sera sera and good riddance.

But he is not any of his parents. Hwæt! He pulls all the books off one of his shelves and lets them slide onto the floor. Dust jackets flap helplessly and pages bend as the books land face-open and awkward. Later, he will feel wretched about the damage because Jason isn’t careless with his things but right now the spare beauty of a bare bookshelf is enough to sing through him. All that exposed antique mahogany—his, to dress up however he wants.

He briefly contemplates taking a belt sander to the shelves, but they’re probably some heirloom and he doesn’t hate the finish. They’re heavy, three matching solid wood bookcases towering 8’ high but he knocks more books to the ground and wiggles the first one out from the wall with a mixture of strength and tenacity. Behind the shelf is dust, some crumpled gum wrappers, and a note in Alfred’s elegant hand reminding him of some long-forgotten after-school appointment.

The other two shelves reveal similar detritus, and Jason is embarrassed for a second about the mess. He’d told Alfred he’d keep his room tidy, and there was all this dust and trash. He grabs what look like a few lines of scribbled poetry, more gum wrappers, a cinnamon tic-tac that doesn’t look like it had aged a day, and a pen cap with no matching pen. He throws them in the trash bin tucked under the heavy mahogany desk that matches the shelves and tries not to think about how it looks like the trash bin hasn’t been emptied since—before.

Then the stirred-up dust makes him sneeze. He should—take care of that first.

The linen closet at the end of the hall has cleaning supplies. Or it did. Alfred had kept it well-stocked with rags and lemon-scented sprays and actual, literal feather dusters. It’s as good a time as any to test the limits of his house arrest, so he unlocks his door and pads down the hall, but when he opens the linen closet there’s nothing but sheets as far as the eye can see.

They had made allowances for him when he first arrived. He had been—he hadn’t expected anything good from Bruce. Batman wasn’t a cop but was, in his way, worse than a cop, did cop shit for kicks and Jason had learned early not to rely on cops for anything. Cops arrested your fucked-up dad and that just fucked him up worse. Cops made lewd comments about your sick mother and what she could do with her mouth. Cops shouldered you out of the way and called you gutter scum just for walking down the street. Cops took whatever they wanted and then laughed about it. If Batman had left him with Bruce, well, it was the same everywhere. Cops and their fucking friends knew what the people of Crime Alley were good for.

But Bruce and Alfred had made allowances. Locks on his doors. No one cleaned his room but him. Kitchen privileges. Nonperishables on the grocery list that he would disappear to caches throughout the house. Four unremarkable duffle bags he could fill with essentials. His own private landline.

It must have been a pain in the ass, doing all that. No one had ever done as much for him before. Bruce had taken it all with equanimity, but Alfred had been—not unkind; Alfred was never unkind, but Jason had caught him looking at him a couple times like he couldn’t quite understand what Jason was or how he had ended up in the Manor. Which really had just made two of them—Bruce was the only one who had ever acted like Jason Todd, gutter trash from Crime Alley, existing in the same space as Bruce Wayne, beloved prince of Gotham, made any kind of sense at all. Sure, Alfred had called him “Master Jason” and “my dear boy” the same way he called Dick and even Bruce that, but there had always been a tension when Jason had skittered into the kitchen to fry some eggs after Alfred had just finished preparing a tarte tatin. Alfred had asked at least once a month if Jason found the cleaning supplies adequate, as if he was just waiting for Jason to give in and ask Alfred to take over. Maybe that’s part of why Jason never had.

He runs his hands over the sheets—linen and silk and real Egyptian cotton. Alfred preferred natural fibers, both for whatever rich person reason he might’ve had and because they apparently held up better. Jason had loved the soft, stretchy jersey sheets you could get at a big box store and Alfred had indulged him with several sets in muted primary colors. Another accommodation, though like the cleaning supplies, Jason’s preferred sheets are now absent.

“Master Jason?” Alfred’s voice comes from behind him, and Jason is on his knees in front of the linen closet, a horrible, animal keening coming, uninvited, from his mouth.

“May I help you?” Alfred dips into his line of sight and shuts the closet door. His voice is soft, patient, gentle—gentler than Jason remembers, which seems wrong. Alfred had never been cruel, but he had always been contained. It was Bruce who had been so—he shuts his mouth, swallows down that awful noise he hadn’t meant to make.

“Am I not allowed to leave my room?” He is so tired of not knowing.

“What are you—”

“I leave and you immediately appear to usher me back. Is that it?”

“Master Jason,” and there is the Alfred he knows, iron fist in velvet glove, voice clear and crisp, bordering on sharpness. “I am not your keeper. The Manor is, as always, your home, and as such you have free rein.”

That doesn’t make sense. If it is, then why had Alfred—

“I heard your sounds of distress, my boy,” Alfred says, that gentleness back in his voice, and oh. He had brought Alfred up the stairs to check on him with his haunting. He touches his fingertips and his cheeks are wet and he swallows down another burst of tears. He wonders if this will become another check in Bruce’s theory of Lazarus Pit madness.

“I wanted to—my room is dusty. Behind the furniture, I mean. I was rearranging.”

Alfred nods. “I’ll bring you the requisite supplies.”

Jason thinks of the paint chips and plaster and drywall scattered across his floor. “I’ll need a broom too. And a vacuum. A stool. And spackle. I—”

But Alfred shakes his head. “No need to explain. I’ll bring the spackle. I’m afraid we may no longer possess the right shade for the walls, though I’m certain we can find a way to match it.”

“It’s fine. I was going to repaint anyway.” He hadn’t known that was true until he said it, but the idea settles some of his roiling emotions. He imagines the walls a different color—something lighter, something he, the Jason that’s alive now, chose. It’s something.

“We can discuss hiring painters with Master Bruce.”

“I want to do it.”

Alfred gives him a long look and Jason sees it there, a flicker of tension around his mouth, his eyes. It’s familiar and while that expression used to make him shove the doomsday clock of his eventual dismissal from the Manor a minute closer to midnight, now Jason finds relief in its familiarity.

“Those are 12’ ceilings, young man.”

“We have ladders.”

“I hope you don’t intend to undertake this venture tonight. The fumes will make that room uninhabitable.”

He hadn’t thought that far ahead, really. He’d never painted a room in his life, just spackled over holes and dents in the walls at the end of a lease. There had been one apartment where Willis had really thought they might get the safety deposit back. The three of them had scoured every inch of that place, Willis scrubbing every scummy divot of the pink-tiled bathroom, Catherine guiding Jason’s hand with a spackle knife and then patiently sanding down the dried excess. Jason can’t remember how it turned out. Probably badly. Crime Alley slumlords held onto those checks like a doomsday prepper held onto copper wiring.

“I just want to clean tonight,” he promises. He realizes also that the spackle will be useless. The holes he put in the wall need to be repaired, and he’s not sure how to do that.

Alfred nods again. “You are determined to do all your cleaning this evening?”

What else would Jason do? He isn’t going out on patrol, he doesn’t have school, there’s no one to train with. “Yeah. That’s a lot though. I can help carry things.” If the Manor truly is his home and if Jason truly does have free rein then this is nothing. This is normal.

And if Alfred tells him to go back to the room and wait? Then he’s learned something new.

Alfred gives him that same tense look, but then leads him down the hall. “You can find most of what you might need in the upstairs laundry,” Alfred says, pushing open a narrow door Jason is absolutely certain didn’t exist before. Alfred slants a knowing look his way. “You’re correct, Master Jason. It was an addition I requested some years ago. I had found myself performing more caretaking duties than previously, and I was no longer as young as I had been. Master Dick also kept bringing his laundry around and had found he preferred to do it himself and I preferred him to not interrupt my schedule for cleaning the linens.”

The room is as needlessly large as the other two laundries in the Manor, with two washers, two driers, an expanse of granite countertop, and a massive apron sink. Cupboards line either side of the room and Alfred shows him the familiar dusters and cleaners and brooms, and hands him a folding step stool for getting the tops of the shelves. “The painting supplies are in the basement storage, as are the ladders. If you want to drop these items in your room, we can go retrieve the spackle.”

Jason does and meets back up with Alfred outside the laundry room. “So Dick started coming around often enough to do his laundry here?” He doesn’t mean to make it a leading question, but it comes out that way. He mostly can’t imagine Dick staying in the manor long enough to get through a rinse cycle.

“Bruce and Richard,” Alfred begins as he descends the east wing stairs, then stops. “Our losing you changed many things and caused both men to reevaluate their priorities.”

On the first floor, Alfred turns toward the end of the hallway, but Jason doesn’t follow him. He’s rooted to the spot. Alfred looks back at him and Jason cracks a smile he’s certain is hideous. “Silver lining to my death, huh? The old man and Dickie gettin’ over themselves?” There’s a thickness in his throat that’s hard to talk past.

Alfred frowns. “That is not the way I would put it,” but before he can try whatever new—gentleness he might’ve discovered, Jason forces himself to take a step forward, then another, until he’s caught up with him. Bruce would probably have demanded to know what Jason was thinking, but Alfred merely accepts the implicit subject-change and continues through the halls until he reaches another door, flipping a lightswitch to reveal a narrow staircase leading downwards.

Alfred had mentioned the basement, but it’s still oddly surprising to him. He had thought it was just the Cave for vigilante business and the attic for storage. “Most of the shopwork happens downstairs now, but Thomas’ father used to be quite an impressive woodturner. The lathe probably does qualify as an antique at this point and may not properly function, but all of his tools remain.” Alfred leads him past a stack of ladders and some thick rolls of carpeting into a workroom that looks like it’s half museum and half high school shop room. Jason spots the lathe, hulking and complicated-looking in the corner, but Alfred is headed towards the pegboard-covered walls on the other side of the room.

“I didn’t know any of this was down here.”

“There was no reason for you to. I don’t believe Master Bruce has ever stepped foot in here. Even I do not often find reason to come down here.” Alfred hands him a small tub of spackle, a putty knife, and several grades of sandpaper. “We outsource most of our more complicated repairs to qualified contractors. Most of what I keep on hand is for these day-to-day fixes. I suspect Master Bruce’s room is more spackle than the original plaster at this point.”

Willis had put his fists through plenty of drywall, and Bruce’s knuckles had always been scarred from his nightwork, but Jason had never thought that Bruce would be the kind of man who punched walls in rage. That Bruce had a temper was no great secret, but he had always kept it tightly leashed—at least physically. Jason wonders if Bruce only developed the habit after, or if Jason had simply missed the obvious.

Jason clutches the useless spackle to his chest. “Thanks, Alf.”

Alfred looks at him a beat too long for it to be truly comfortable, but simply says, “is there anything else I might assist you with?”

“No. I’m good.”

And then he’s flying up the stairs, back to his room where there are plenty of things to do so he doesn’t have to think.

It takes most of the night, the sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, doing laundry, pushing the heavy king bed from the center of the room into a corner, shoving his desk under the window, staring at the three new holes, losing time, pushing a bookshelf in front of the holes then dragging it back to the other side of the room. He puts the sheets back on the bed and the books back on the shelves and curls up next to his desk with his back to the wall and watches the clock tick up. It’s 3:03 in the morning. It’s 5:16. The birds are chirping and Bruce never came to say he was back from patrol. It’s 6:00. The sky is getting light and the three holes in the wall stare at him.

He wonders where his empty coffin is.

If his coffin was empty.

At about a quarter till seven he decides that he’s too wired to sleep. He takes a shower, scrubbing all of the dust and debris he’s accumulating from his crazed late-night room cleaning out of his hair and pulls on more of his new clothes for his new body. He runs his fingers over his jaw and feels the stubble there, but he doesn’t think he can face the ordeal of shaving just yet.

This far out in Bristol there’s not an easy way to get to Gotham proper, but it’s not an unreasonable walk to the nearest bus station. Jason supposes he could borrow one of Bruce’s cars, but he’s still trying to be a good son, and while he’s fairly sure Bruce would not approve of Jason leaving the Manor grounds in any situation, there’s something that feels less transgressive about making use of Gotham’s sub-par public transit system than pulling grand theft auto with one of Bruce’s sleek Lincoln Town Cars, complete with ballistic protection straight from the factory.

The bus isn’t due for a while, at least as far as Jason can tell from the posted bus schedule and the position in the sun in the sky, but Jason entertains himself well enough with the thick sheaf of yesterday’s newspapers abandoned on the bench. The outlook for Gotham sports hasn’t gotten any less grim in the intervening years, and the crime section in the Gazette seems to have tripled in thickness. His eyes glance over the section on the Joker’s movements once, twice, before he can force himself to read about his murderer, walking free. He’s lying low, apparently, and GCPD have no idea where he’s lying low. Batman presumably doesn’t either, or else he’d have done something about him by now. Presumably.

Jason flips to the society pages.

The bus comes to a stop with shrieking brakes and Jason boards, newspaper tucked under his arm. Fare has increased by 75 cents, which seems extreme for the kind of service offered, but Jason pays it with the coins he squirreled away in his room over the three years at the Manor. He takes a seat on one of the hard orange seats near the back of the bus and watches a mostly-empty 20 oz bottle of soda roll back and forth across the bus floor. People board, people leave. When the bus fills up Jason offers his seat to an older man and finds the bar that runs along the top of the bus is easy to reach.

Three transfers later, and he’s walking the streets of downtown Gotham again. The sun is a bleary smear up in the hazy sky and the air smells fetid and damp and his heart pulses in time with his step. Wet trash is piled up in the gutters and grotesques peer over the edges of buildings and cars let out loud, angry honks and it’s wretched and the familiarity of it settles something heavy and solid inside him.

The old Gotham cemetery—which is really the new old Gotham cemetery, the oldest cemetery in the city having run out of lots in the early 19th century—is shoved in the southeast corner of the southernmost island, where the skyscrapers and grids of the central city give way to six story walk ups and diagonal streets. The steeply-angled spires of Gotham cathedral can be seen jutting stubbornly into the sky, and Jason heads towards it. The cemetery is a sprawling two hundred acres adjacent to the cathedral, and when Jason arrives at the wrought iron gates he feels a certain kind of foreboding. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Maybe he’ll ascend from the depths of here to some kind of purgatory, to be remade stronger than ever, and certain. Now that would be a miracle.

He isn’t sure where to start looking for his grave, so he heads towards Catherine’s instead. Bruce had had her remains exhumed from the indigent burial she’d ended up with and reburied here. They had planned a funeral—a small one, simple, just him and Alfred and Bruce and the priest from their old church, back when church had been a thing. Jason had cried after in a way he hadn’t cried when he’d found her. He had visited her when he could, after. Her birthday and his. Epiphany and Good Friday. Days that had meant something to her, that had meant something to them. It had made him feel a little better about spending Christmas and Thanksgiving curled up and cozy in the Manor.

If he had been thinking at all he would’ve brought flowers. Catherine had loved carnations. Willis had always bought them for her on their anniversary. She had shown him how putting food dye into the water of a bouquet of cut white carnations would make them whatever you wanted—pink or green or pale blue. He’d found out later that carnations were considered cheap, and one year he’d brought roses instead but it had felt all wrong. Besides, he hadn’t brought flowers to his mother’s grave to show off his wealth and taste; that was a game for people of Bruce’s ilk. The only one who had to like the flowers was his mother.

He’s thinking of what he’s going to say to her when he gets there but he’s drawn up short by the tarp stretched over the rectangular framework of the lot next to hers, and oh. That’s him.

That’s his grave. That’s his exhumed grave. The one he dug out of.

He takes a step forward then stops. An angel statue, carved of expensive black-veined granite, weeps above him. He tastes dirt again and sucks air heavily through his teeth. Here lies Jason Todd the plinth says, but there are no dates, no other words. Here lies Jason Todd, but he’s standing, he’s floating, he’s as ephemeral as smoke.

His mouth is dry, or is it the dirt sucking all the moisture out? There’s not enough air, and he’s going to suffocate here, he’s going to peel back the tarp and lay down in the hole and Bruce will spill a delicate handful of dirt over his body and recite Hope is the thing with feathers, like he had let fall a handful of dirt over Catherine’s urn and recited the same poem three years ago when he was twelve.

He crawls to the edge of the tarp. His knees are wet. His fingers are bloody and there’s dirt down the collar of his shirt and Alfred will be so upset with him, with the dirt and the wet and the storm and the blood. He pulls at the tarp. He’s looking for his body. He just needs to find his body, and then he’ll settle into the decaying skin, spirit and flesh together, and this will be over and he will be dead.

He is dead.

The tarp comes away, sagging into the cavity of the grave and there’s nothing in the earth, just a sharply-carved rectangle, a canyon. He keens; he wails; he makes a scene. There is no body, no home for his restless spirit. Thunder cracks sharply overhead and the rain pours over him, through him. He is unmoored.

He is dead.

He digs his hand into the edges of the soil and dirt gets under his nails. He teeters on the brink of the grave. A consummation devoutly to be wished. Again, again, the thought he can’t shake out. He should throw the decaying meat of this body he’s haunting into the grave and be done with it. He should sink into the earth and sleep. He deserves to sleep.

He is dead.

“That is enough,” a voice says, and then he’s pulled back by his shirt collar. He looks up, and the most beautiful woman in the world looks back at him.

“Talia,” he breathes. There is no dirt, no thunder, no rain. He’s wearing jeans and a sweater and when he looks at his hands they are whole and foreign.

“I told you not to return to this place,” she says, and he looks up into her eyes. Her words are terse, but there’s a slight curve at her mouth. She looks almost fond. He feels an answering warmth spark in his chest and he smothers it.

“I’m sure you were just concerned for me,” he says, and his voice is weak but the wryness comes out well enough. It’ll do.

“Is that so surprising?”

“You don’t know me.”

Talia is a predator, a big cat or a raptor. She tilts her head and looks at him, not through him, and he reminds himself that he should not trust this woman. “Don’t I?” she says, measuring her words. “For nearly three years I kept you by my side. I found you when nobody else was even looking. I trained your body and shared meals with you and held you when you woke at night, screaming your father’s name. I was with you when you plunged into the Lazarus waters. I was with you when you came back to yourself, full of righteous fury. And you claim I do not know you?”

He thinks of his body on the streets of Gotham, pantomiming life but really just surviving. He thinks of Talia, of her fingers in his sweat-soaked hair, of her voice humming tunelessly, of her trimming his nails with a sharp-edged blade. Memories, drawn to the surface by the sound of her voice, and soft ones too. “That wasn’t me,” he says, but it sounds like a lie. “I wasn’t myself. I was basically a zombie.”

“You weren’t,” she replies, voice sharp. “You were muted. You were lost. But you were yourself.” Her voice softens again. “You are still lost.”

“And you’re offering to help with that? What’s your game, Talia? You didn’t take me in out of the goodness of your heart, I’m sure. Did you think Bruce would thank you for, what, taking care of me? Fixing me? Did you think it would make him love you again? That it would change anything?”

He expects—something. A blade to the throat, a kick to the ribs. He didn’t know Talia well before, but he knew of her, knew that once upon a time she had been Bruce’s world, before Bruce had realized that the world she offered him wasn’t a world he wanted. He knew that she didn’t accept that, knew that she still dogged Bruce’s steps, still considered him her destiny, her beloved. Maybe he doesn’t know enough to really hurt her, but the disrespect of his words should be enough to rile her. Instead she tilts her head in her predator way and says, “this is exactly why I told you not to come back to Gotham.”

“What?”

“How are you finding the city? Is it welcoming you as you hoped it would?”

There is no way she could know. He had divested himself of bugs and trackers immediately after he had fled the League. The Manor is one of the most secure facilities on the eastern seaboard. Bruce had cleared him of any magical detritus his first night back. There is no way she could know, but the directness of her gaze and the tiny upward twitch of her lips suggests that she does.

“I always find it inhospitable,” she continues airily, but her eyes bore into his. “There is a beating heart beneath, but it beats in a rhythm I cannot understand. I come back from time to time, in the vain hope that might one day change, but I have learned to temper my expectations. Have you?”

“I’m from here,” he says, and then, “I belong here.”

“Those are not the same thing and you know it.” She takes a step towards him, and he should step away but he does not. “You will always want more than this city is willing to give you.”

“You don’t know me,” he says again, but it’s not convincing. It’s not even angry—just sheer defensiveness, on the edge of begging.

“Oh Jason,” and she says his name with sympathy, with fondness, with warmth, tracing her hand along his cheek, along the thin ghost of a scar he doesn’t remember getting, “I’m the only one who truly does.”

Chapter Text

Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

“Again,” Barbara demands, hefting her escrima sticks. He shakes his sweaty bangs out of his eyes and mirrors her position. His body is alive with endorphins and his muscles are loose and responsive and he’s barely winded. It’s his mind that’s sluggish, fogged with a sleepless night, an exhumed grave, and conversations he hadn’t been ready for.

When he’d been delivered to a suite of offices above a series of cute boutiques in a rapidly gentrifying part of old Gotham, Barbara had taken one look at him and dragged him down to a training room to run escrima drills. It hadn’t stopped Talia’s words, terrible and vulture-certain, from circling in his head.

“You’re unfocused,” Barbara says when he misses a beat and his swing connects with nothing but air. Jason’s gaze darts to the weight bench where the sleek shadow of a girl that had interrupted his tête-à-tête with Talia al Ghul sits, watching them spar with dark eyes. The girl may have driven Talia away from him before she could wreck any more damage, with words or blows, but Jason still knows danger when it presents itself. Barbara frowns, following his gaze. She doesn’t pause her sure, careful strikes.

“I didn’t introduce you.” It’s not really a question, but Jason still answers “no” as the girl—she can’t be much older than him—shakes her head. Barbara’s frown deepens and she uses one stick to block his lunge instead of the two he expects, gesturing at the girl with the other. “Jason, this is Cassandra. Batgirl.”

Cassandra gives him a small wave that does nothing to diminish her inscrutability and Barbara swings an escrima stick at his ribs that he’s too dumbstruck to block. It lands firmly, and the sound of blunt metal against skin and bone sets a memory stirring somewhere in his gut. They had only been moving at half speed. The force is enough to smart but nothing more. His ribs aren’t broken. His ribs aren’t broken.

“Hi,” he says to Cassandra. “It’s nice to meet you.” He swallows the spit pooling in his mouth and doesn’t taste blood. Barbara is still. Her escrima sticks sit in her lap and her hand covers her mouth. She looks horrified. “I’m fine, Barbie,” he says, and does his voice sound oddly thick or is that just him? He swallows again and still doesn’t taste blood. “S’not the first time I’ve taken a hit during training. Won’t be the last.”

“You aren’t fine,” Barbara says, clenching both of her sticks with white-knuckled hands. She sounds authoritative, like Bruce, like Talia. He’s getting pretty tired of people telling him what he is and he isn’t.

“C’mon. Let’s just keep going.” Like it’s going to change anything. Like the secret to stopping his things falling the fuck apart is the right number of drills with a weapon he’s never studied much beyond the basic competencies.

Barbara lets him pretend though. He goes through the drill even worse than before, marionette-stiff, piloting the pulleys and levers of his foreign body through sheer force of will. His brain is Gotham sewer sludge. If he tipped his head to the side he’s pretty sure it would drip straight out his ear.

Barbara raps his knuckles sharply and he drops his stick with a curse. He kneels to pick it up, to try and fail again, but before he can straighten Barbara says, “You aren’t fine.”

He looks up at her, iron-cored and unruffled, she who came back better, stronger, braver, smarter, a cool-eyed Anubis, weighing souls against a feather. Something heavy grinds in his chest. He tastes bile on his tongue. She is right. He is not fine. He is alive, theoretically, and moving but his ribs are cracked open, skin split and splayed to reveal a heart that beats still in the rhythm of a world four years gone. Everyone seems to be able to see it, no matter what he does. He is tired of being examined—by her, by Bruce, by fucking Talia al Ghul, and he keenly wants to see someone else made as vulnerable, as ugly, as broken as he feels.

His words didn’t have much of an effect on Talia, but Barbara—he knows Barbara. He knows enough, at least. His tongue is a lash and he opens his mouth to flay her when Cassandra cuts between them with a bow, offering her hand to him. “May I have this dance?”

He stares at her hand—small, heavily calloused, scarred—while his brain spits poisonous words and his body completely fails to cooperate. This is the new Batgirl. He supposes it makes sense—Barbara can’t be Batgirl anymore, and if Robin is a legacy mantle then there’s no reason why Batgirl couldn’t be as well. He tries to adjust the image of Batgirl in his mind, replacing Barbara’s red hair with Cassandra’s sleek black bob, Barbara’s broad-shouldered build with Cassandra’s petite one. He’s seen a bit of her fighting style and she’s good. Great, really. Barbara wouldn’t send her out there unless she’s exceptional.

He takes her hand and she hauls him to his feet. He hadn’t really thought about what she had meant by “dance” until she’s driving a punch at his head. He stumbles back, clumsy, and she says, “You think too much. Stop thinking.”

He manages a dry bark of laughter—stop thinking, if only he could—before he has to twist away from a strike to his ribs. She follows up with a leg sweep he manages to dodge and a nerve strike he doesn’t. His left arm goes limp, numb, and he almost taps out then. There’s no way he’s going to beat her. She’s too fast, too good, and his body is overlarge and clumsy and foreign. She comes at him again with a series of punches and kicks that are mostly unfamiliar. He can see a bit of Bruce in her, some of Barbara, but someone else trained her and he can’t begin to guess who.

“Stop thinking,” she says again when he takes a hit to the shoulder that yeah, he really should have been able to dodge. She’s pulling her hits so it’s more of a tap than anything, but it rankles. Bruce would be embarrassed to see him making such a poor showing of himself.

Cassandra’s eyebrows are drawn together and her mouth is a flat line. The strikes come at him faster and with more force and he stops dodging in favor of blocking and then starts just taking hits instead of trying to block. Her control is impeccable and nothing truly hurts, but he doesn’t understand what the point of this is other than to illustrate her talent and skill.

“I am trying,” Cassandra answers, almost like she’s read his thoughts, “to show you.” She whips her arm toward his throat in a killing strike and something sparks in his brain. He catches her wrist, twists. She moves with the torsion, throwing her body into a flip. The momentum breaks his hold but he exploits her mid-air vulnerability with a sharp kick. She lands with a handspring, ready to lunge toward him, but he is already there.

They dance. She matches her steps to his. She tries to slam her foot down on his instep but he uses his longer reach to kick his leg out and catch her ankle, pulling her off balance. She twists as she goes down, trapping his knee between her ankles and pulling him off balance too. He rolls into a somersault and comes up just in time to block an elbow to his face. He brings his other arm around to punch her in the stomach. She takes the hit and steps into his guard to land another nerve strike at the junction of his neck and shoulder. He retaliates by driving his shoulder at her chin. Her teeth clack together and her eyes gleam.

She speeds up, hits harder, and his blood sings. Her blows will bruise but his will too. He flips out of her range and lands easily before diving back in with a nerve strike of his own. She seems to be able to see through his feints and strategies so he tries not to think, tries only to act, and his body moves through the steps like it was made for this.

Cassandra eventually lands a hard enough hit to his jaw that Barbara calls the spar off. Jason is breathing hard, shirt soaked with sweat. Cassandra looks composed, but her skin is flushed and her hair is no longer neatly parted. Jason flexes his hands, watches his fingers curl and unfurl. He feels his lungs expand, his heart pound, and he is alive.

“Thank you,” he tells Cassandra.

Cassandra shrugs, like she hasn’t given him a gift. “Your body knows, even when your mind does not.”

“Speaking of that,” Barbara’s clear voice cuts in, “I didn’t recognize some of those techniques. Cass, could you pick out anything specific?”

Jason isn’t sure why Barbara’s asking Cassandra like she’s some martial arts analysis machine, but at least it’s not more questions he can’t answer. He’s a little surprised though; he’d thought Barbara would’ve insisted on debriefing him about his little rendezvous with Talia by now.

Cassandra takes a long time before she says, “Cain. Turner. Shiva, some. Mostly Talia. He didn’t…I had to use a move…”

“Something meant to kill. You had to come at me with that kill-strike before I could get out of my head enough to fight.”

“I don’t kill,” Cassandra says, harshly.

“I didn’t think you did,” he says, but Cassandra is bristling, drawing her shoulders up and pressing her lips together. He’s obviously misstepped here, but he doesn’t know how to salvage it. He doesn’t know her, doesn’t know anything about her. He just knows she’d had to come at him with serious intent to harm to get him to be present in his body. “I’m sorry.”

Cassandra seems to have an entire vocabulary of shrugs. This one is a severe jerk of her shoulders. “You don’t understand.” And he doesn’t. He doesn't even know what he supposedly doesn’t understand—if it’s something specifically about her and killing or if it’s something about not killing in general. If it’s the former then—sure. He has a grimy suspicion growing that it’s the latter. Barbara had needed to introduce Cassandra to him but Cassandra had seemed to know exactly who he was. Barbara or Bruce, either of them, could’ve told her about his last, awful months with Bruce—a litany of broken bones he’d granted to some child-trafficking scum, arguments about putting down monsters, a death Jason had never managed to clear himself of. Bruce had certainly thought Jason didn’t understand.

“Cass was raised by David Cain,” Barbara volunteers, as if that’s supposed to clarify something. She’s looking at him like he’s a puzzle she can’t solve, or (ha!) a bomb she can’t defuse. The magic of sparring with Cassandra is gone. He is overlarge and wrong-footed and filled with poison.

“Yeah? Well, we all have damage,” he says with a shrug of his own. He says it with his natural accent, the one he’d worked so hard to flatten, the one that’s always creeping at the edge of his tongue. He says it with the mean-spirited carelessness he learned from listening to Willis talk with his buddies, from listening to other street kids talk with each other.

Barbara looks disappointed in him. Cassandra’s drawn in on herself even further and after a moment stalks past him, shoulder-checking him on the way out of the training room. Jason feels a thrill of vindication at that. “We done playing kumbaya, then? Going to get down to why you really brought me here?”

“If you’d rather debrief with Batman then be my guest.” The words rattle out of her harsh and rhythmic.

“Like there’s a difference.”

“I am trying to help you,” she grinds out. “God knows why since you insist on being such a little asshole.”

“Sorry I didn’t expect your assassin protege to be so goddamn sensitive about what she is.”

Barbara opens her mouth for what’s bound to be a scalding assessment of his own sensitivity but then forcibly shuts it. Her nostrils flare, like she’s doing some deep breathing exercise. “Cass has a complicated relationship with killing. She is sensitive about it. She’s allowed to be.”

Something in him deflates at Babs’ change in tone from aggressive to careful. Not his anger—he seems stuck with that—but clarity of purpose. He wants a fight. Getting his ass kicked by Cassandra apparently hadn’t been enough. “Yeah, well the implication that I’m too dumb to understand that killing is wrong sure was something.”

“Cass isn’t good with words.”

“Ok.” He’s tired. “Are you going to ask me about Talia now?”

“Do you actually want to talk about it?”

“Of course not. But it’s Oracle or Batman, right?” And then because he can admit he’s being petty and childish he mumbles, “at least you asked.”

Barbara frowns—he wonders if she ever smiles anymore—and guides him out of the training room to the elevators. Barbara hits the button for the basement, which turns out to be a room that’s dominated by a bank of monitors and seems to mostly consist of server racks. It’s chilly, the AC blasting Jason’s sweaty shirt to his skin.

“The energy bill for this room alone is an environmental crime,” Barbara murmurs. Her hands glide over a keyboard and the monitor array sparks to life. Barbara brings up what looks like a sleeker version of a default media player on one screen.

“I’m going to record our conversation. I’d like to have video, but audio is fine if you’d rather not. I know video recordings are…complicated, for you.”

He considers clarifying that it wasn’t the video that bothered him but the content, but explaining himself seems impossible and he’s tired. “Video’s fine.”

The debrief is about as frustrating as any of his debriefs with Bruce. No, he hadn’t known Talia would be there. No, he doesn’t know what she wanted. No, they hadn’t talked about anything really, just that she’d been the one to find him on the streets of Gotham, that she’d been the one to care for his catatonic body, that she’d been the one to throw him in the Pit. He keeps her last words to himself and when Barbara asks if seeing her had triggered any memories he lies and says no.

Then Barbara asks why he had gone to the cemetery in the first place and he isn’t able to say anything at all. He tries, he does, but his brain gets caught—I, I, I, over and over again, a broken record.

Barbara pauses the recording after he’s been silent for at least a minute. No point recording dead air, he supposes, but then she does it too, says “I—” and then a long pause. Jason waits.

“I would get up in the middle of the night and stare at the front door,” Barbara says. “After I went home. Dad wanted to move but I didn’t want to let him win. That house was my childhood home. He had already taken enough. I knew all of this intellectually; I had my reasons. But I still would get up in the middle of the night and stare at the front door, seeing him there in that awful shirt with that stupid six-shot pistol.”

Silence falls between them but this time it’s sacred, like St. Mary’s in silent prayer before Mass, or the reading room of the Park Row branch of the Gotham Public Library. When Jason dares to break it he makes sure it’s for a vulnerability of equal worth.

“I needed to see it. My grave. I needed to see that it was empty. I needed to know if it wasn’t.”

When Barbara says “Jason, you’re alive,” she says it like any other fact: Cassandra is Batgirl, Barbara Gordon is Oracle, Jason is alive. Her certainty is absolute and he wants to believe her. He used to believe in her. She had been his hero, her and Dick and Donna and Roy, that first generation of kid soldiers who went to war because they thought they could make a difference. But that had been before war had made both Barbara and him collateral damage.

“The worst part,” he says, then stumbles. He isn’t actually sure this is the worst part. He can’t look at the whole of it; it dwarfs him. Like the incomprehensible depths of the ocean, or the vastness of the sky—it’s too big. Maybe it’s enough to share one of the worst parts, and he’s already started, so—“the worst part is that it wasn’t even about me. I was just there. It could’ve been anyone—you, Dick, Selina, Alfred—and it would’ve been the same. Not saying you would’ve fallen for it but—”

“No. I get it. It was the same for me. It wasn’t about Batgirl. I was just the commissioner's daughter. I was a means to an end.”

“A means to an end,” he echoes hollowly. “Though Bruce—he says you’re even stronger than you were before. That you came back better.”

A series of expressions Jason can’t decipher flickers across Barbara’s features until they settle into a tight smile. “Bruce would see it that way.”

“You don’t?”

Barbara catches her lower lip between her teeth and chews at it long enough for Jason to wonder if he’s asked something inappropriate before she says, “it’s just different. I can’t compare the two. I wouldn’t trade who I am now for who I was, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss what I had.” And then, softer, just to herself, she says, “god I miss it.”

Jason thinks, for the first time since he could think again, of being Robin, of the muggy Gotham air against his bare legs, of the bright yellow cloak flaring behind him like a flame, of his body, his, soaring through the air, of sticking the landing, of a downing a scumbag with a single, perfect kick, of Batman, dark and solid and hot like a furnace, guarding his back. The drop off the edge of a building, the surge of adrenaline when the grapnel caught and swung him back up. The belief that he was a hero and that meant something.

He can’t imagine being Robin again.

It isn’t even that he had thought heroes couldn’t die. He knew well enough how the stories go—Achilles with his pierced ankle, Jesus or Kirk Douglas on the cross, Sydney Carton going to the gallows. He knew more keenly how stories like his were supposed to go. Neither Willis nor Catherine had made it to 40. He’d grown up under a double shadow of an early death. He’d just expected it to matter.

He breathes out, trying to force the spiky anger clawing at his chest into something flat and manageable. He wants to ask if he’ll ever be something different, something he wouldn’t trade to the past, but he doesn’t want pleasantries and he doesn’t want the truth. “Where can I find Cassandra?”

“Why?”

He will never be Robin again, can never be Robin again, but he still can be Bruce Wayne’s son, and Bruce Wayne’s son isn’t the kind of person who takes out his anger on other people and just walks away from the wreck left over. Bruce Wayne’s son doesn’t lash out. “I owe her an apology.”

Barbara’s smile is slight, but her approval is clear, and for the first time since coming back he feels sure that he’s done something right. “Try the fourth floor.”

Cassandra sprawls on an overstuffed sofa in loose sweats and a violently orange crop top, staring at a truly massive flatscreen TV and mouthing along to some ‘90s romcom he vaguely recognizes. She has a bowl of popcorn mixed with M&Ms nestled in her lap and when he clears the elevator doors she moves her black-hole gaze straight to him and shoves a handful of food into her mouth, chewing conspicuously.

“This movie is based off Emma,” he says helpfully as the hideous yellow plaid ensemble the lead actress is wearing triggers a memory of himself, concussed and benched and too dizzy to read sitting alone in his room at the Manor, watching a slew of modern film adaptations of books he’d read. He hadn’t enjoyed most of them.

Cassandra doesn’t say anything, just raises her eyebrows and yeah, that’s fair. He hadn’t come here to comment on her taste in movies.

He looks at the ceiling, trying to get his words in line. The fourth floor is mostly unfinished. The tubing for the HVAC system hangs low. If he scuffs his foot over the floor, the low-pile carpet moves with him, like they just rolled it out and didn’t bother to nail it down.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to belittle what you went through. With Cain.” It’s more than that. He didn’t mean to get angry at all, to jump to conclusions, to lash out. He’s not sure how to explain all that, but starting here can’t hurt.

“Belittle?”

Jadson doesn’t get what she's asking at first, thinks she wants him to grovel a bit, give a play-by-play of what he’d done wrong. To prove that he both understands his mistake and really means his apology. He’s about to swallow his shame and embarrassment and indulge her. On the TV the lead actress natters on in a debate class in what would be a very convincing imitation of Brucie Wayne if it was intended as such and Jason’s briefly distracted. Cassandra pauses the movie without looking away from him. “Belittle. Like ‘make small’?” She prompts. Oh. She just wants to know what the word means.

“Yeah. Exactly. Like minimizing something or—treating something that’s important like it actually isn’t.”

Cassandra considers the definition, eyes going distant and then focusing in on him again. “You were angry.”

There’s no reason for him to feel so exposed by that observation, especially one stated so factually, but his cheeks heat anyway. “Yeah. When you said I didn’t understand I assumed—” and how to explain what he assumed? Sorry, I thought you were calling me a murderer, is more than he really wants to get into with a functional stranger, especially if no one had ever explained that fiasco to her. Sorry, I was pissed that you rightly identified that I actually don’t think killing is the worst thing you can do, is even worse.

Cassandra’s mouth slants upwards before he has to finish his thought. “Whenever you assume, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’,” she says, with the rhythmic intonation of a recited quotation.

“Yeah,” he agrees helplessly. “I was being an ass.”

“You were angry. When I said you didn’t understand. You assumed I meant it about you. But I meant…” She makes several indecipherable gestures with her hands. “I am not good at making people understand with words. Words are … slippery.”

Words are slippery, but that’s sort of what Jason loves about them. From the way Cassandra is opening and closing her fists, like she’s trying to grasp something tangible, she clearly doesn’t feel the same way. He can try to bridge that gap for her. He owes her that much. “It was when I said the thing about killing. That’s when you got angry.”

He’s rewarded with a nod.

“I didn’t mean to imply that you would’ve killed me. I know you wouldn’t have even hurt me, not really. You just needed to make me forget I knew that.” For his head to stop fighting his body. Or for his spirit to better possess the sack of rotting meat it’s dragging around Gotham. One of the two.

Cassandra is still for a few moments, like she’s examining his words or lining up her own. “I am sorry too. I should have seen what you meant. It is just important. Not killing.” The more he talks to her the more he can tell she’s not really someone who likes talking. Her words are stilted but painstakingly careful, like her tongue is a snake she doesn’t entirely trust. It reminds him a little of how he practiced smoothing out his own accent, flattening his vowels, carefully enunciating his consonants.

“Okay,” he says, and then because that doesn’t seem like enough, “You don’t kill and it’s an important part of you.” He wants to ask why. He’s trying not to assume, but David Cain is an assassin and Cassandra hadn’t fought like Barbie had trained her. Cassandra alone had been enough to drive Talia al Ghul away. Cassandra, who found the mere suggestion that she might kill unsettling and who speaks with the halting awkwardness of a non-native speaker but without any identifiable accent. Cassandra whose crop top reveals a flat stomach carved with muscle and scar tissue. He doesn’t want to assume, but the dots connect into a horrifying constellation.

“You think very loud,” Cassandra says, and Jason looks at the TV. In the frozen scene on the screen two girls sneer at each other while standing at podiums, and Jason, for a tilting moment, flashes back to class debate at Gotham Academy.

“You like this movie?”

This time Cassandra accepts the subject change with an easy shrug. “I watch to learn. Words and quotes. Barbara likes this one.”

“I did that a lot too—watched movies by myself to learn. I was trying to get the references the kids at school kept making. I didn’t grow up watching the same things as they did. We didn’t have cable.”

“We did not have television,” Cassandra volunteers in what, from anyone else, would’ve come across as an underhanded act of misery oneupmanship but from her is simply a neutral fact. “You said this movie is based on … Emma? A book?”

“Yeah, by Austen. Uh, Jane Austen. She’s a nineteenth century novelist. She also wrote Pride and Prejudice? That’s the big one everyone knows. There’s been a couple of film adaptations of it.”

“I have seen Pride and Prejudice, though it was hard. The words. I like these better.” She waves at the screen and he can’t help but make a face. There’s nothing precisely wrong with that, and it makes sense if modern English is enough of a struggle for her, but he still feels slightly put out at the idea of someone preferring a teen romcom over classic literature.

Cassandra’s laugh is raspy but bright. “You don’t agree. That’s okay. Family is meant to fight.”

She hasn’t, strictly speaking, invited him to sit but he feels relaxed enough to invite himself. As soon as he sinks into the very comfortable couch, she kicks her feet into his lap. Feeling vindicated in his correct choice, he quotes airily, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“Where is that from?”

“Anna Karenina. Another nineteenth century novel. A Russian guy named Leo Tolstoy wrote it. I never read it. I meant to, but—” he had meant to read so many books, before. Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, A George Eliot book that wasn’t Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Dumas’ historical romances, so many more. And after that he’d planned to read something that had been published within the last fifty years, if only to shut Dick up about his being a Victorian ingénue in a pre-teen boy’s body. He’d never gotten to any of them. He can’t remember what he was reading when he left for Ethiopia. He thinks he finished something on the plane. Little Women, maybe. Something he’d read before. He’d been too excited to focus on something new. He’d thought—no. He pinches the sensitive skin on the inside of his wrist. It is 2006 and he is in Gotham, New Jersey. He only realizes he’s spoken aloud when he hears his own words. He cuts a glance at Cassandra, wondering if she’s going to comment on his very obvious freakout, but Cassandra just unpauses the movie.

They watch in silence, Cassandra mouthing the words, Jason notating the parallels with Emma. When they both laugh at the same line, Cassandra gives him a look he can’t quite read and calls him “little brother.” It’s flattering, being adopted summarily by a stranger who he got off on the wrong foot with. Not that Jason seems to have a right foot. Bruce is pretty much the only person he’s ever met who liked him immediately but Bruce is, objectively, not calibrated correctly. He feels a rush of affection for her, this person who isn’t from his old life, who’s decided he’s worthwhile just for himself. It’s evidence that he isn’t just a ghost or a figment in the collective imagination of those who once knew him.

He relaxes further into the baggy cushions of the couch and she immediately slots herself against his side and Jason is comfortable.

Towards the end of the movie, Barbara comes in, sees Cassandra slumped against his shoulder and, yep, drooling, and gives him the softest smile he’s ever seen from her. Jason feels another rush of affection, this time for the half-assed pseudo-industrial space with its ridiculous TV and schlubby puce couch and Cassandra’s warmth and Barbara’s steady, clear-eyed presence.

Barbara wheels over to him and pulls out a small, sleek rectangle that looks like a smaller version of her tablet from yesterday. She clicks a button on the edge and hands it to him. “This is for you. The latest in WayneTech communications.”

Jason takes the phone, which is just one flat expanse of glass. He remembers his last phone having a cutting-edge slide-out keyboard. This is full-on Star Trek nonsense. He touches the screen and it lights up. A picture of him and Cassandra has been set as the background; Babs must’ve taken it on the sly. “She called me her little brother,” he says, and he can’t quite fight down a stupid grin. “Guess she decided to adopt me.”

He’s sort of expecting another fond smile from Barbara, but she gives him a thoughtful frown instead. “Oh, no. I mean, I’m sure she likes you fine but she was being literal. Bruce adopted her about a year ago. Cass is legally your older sister.”

He doesn’t think he tenses, but Cassandra jerks awake anyway. “Is it over?” she says, no bleariness in her voice; she is immediately perfectly alert. Jason had come to Bruce pre-programmed with jumpy hypervigilance, but he’d always gone straight past awareness into a fight-or-flight panic response. They’d been working on it, before. Cassandra walks the line perfectly. Jason tries not to wonder if she’d have ended up being Robin if the position had been vacant. He tries not to know that she’d have been a transcendent Robin.

He is so fucking stupid. All this time he’s been caught up on Tim Drake and his impeccable Bristol credentials when Cassandra’s existed, brilliant at combat and already adopted, and no one had thought to mention her. He gets—he gets the other things. He does. But this—Talia might not have deemed her relevant, but Alfred? Bruce? “Do you not live at the Manor?” He demands. Did they kick her out when he came back just to hide this detail?

Cassandra looks at Barbara, not Jason, and says, “Explain?” Then she’s disentangling her limbs from his, disappearing into a dark hallway on silent feet, almost as if she'd never been there at all.

“No one told me.”

Barbara’s eyes are not unkind but when she speaks it’s with the same pitying tone she used when she had told him he’d never be Dick Grayson. “I’m telling you now,” she says, unwavering, and to think that only minutes ago he’d been thinking fondly of her steadiness.

She must read something on his face because she sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. “I didn’t keep it from you on purpose and I’m sure Bruce didn’t either. You coming back unexpectedly, and after all this time—there’s no playbook for it. I can’t give you a dossier on the past four years. I don’t think you’d want one anyway.”

That’s a big assumption on Barbara’s part, though right now he’ll settle for one straight answer. “Did Cassandra get kicked out of the Manor because of me?”

Barbara runs her fingers through her hair again and then gathers it up into a stubby ponytail, binding it with a thin elastic. Several chunks immediately escape, and Jason’s fingers itch to fix them. He crosses his arms instead. “Cassandra’s never lived at that Manor, actually. She lived with me at my previous base of operations before it was destroyed. She now stays at the Wayne penthouse in the Diamond District.”

“Okay.” It’s not, really, but it’ll have to be okay. “Glad there’s at least that.” Without Cassandra’s warmth he’s cold again. There’s no clock in the room but his new phone has one. It’s half past two. “I should get back.”

“There’s barely five minutes left in the movie.” If he had to guess, he’d say Barbara’s trying to wheedle him into staying but her words come out like a bizarre dare. I bet you don’t have the guts to see this through, where this is a mediocre cult classic from when his adult teeth had still been coming in.

“I know how it ends.” He takes the stairs when he leaves.

Bruce is waiting for him in the foyer when he steps into the Manor out of the spitting rain. Or, more accurately, Bruce is pacing the length of the foyer like an agitated zoo animal. Jason hasn’t even shut the door all the way before Bruce shifts his pacing mid-step to crowd him.

“You’re late.” There are lines of tension in his face that Jason doesn’t recognize. Under the warm lights of the foyer wall sconces the gray in his hair shines silver. “You left Barbara’s over two hours ago.”

Jason wasn’t aware he’d had a schedule to keep. He leans back against the door and dangles the black and red electronics store bag between them. “Babs gave me a phone but not a charger or a case. I made a stop to fix that.”

Bruce doesn’t seem to hear him, reaching past him to press two fingers up against the pulse point right below his jaw. The tension eases out of Bruce’s face as he feels Jason’s heart pumping blood through his body. Jason finds his irritation easing away as well.

“I get it,” he says softly, clasping his own hand around Bruce’s wrist. “I keep checking too. Sorry to worry you.” He’s not sorry for taking the long way back to the Manor or for his detour, but he doesn’t like the idea of worrying Bruce. “You could’ve called me, you know. Babs got me the same number and everything.”

Bruce keeps his fingers against his neck for another five heartbeats before pulling his hand away and taking a step back. “J’onn is waiting for us in the parlor. I understand you would prefer to avoid it, but with Talia surfacing in Gotham I’m afraid it’s become necessary to perform a psychic threat assessment. The League has been known to deploy subconsciously compromised soldiers in the past.”

It’s Batman talking to him, not Bruce. Jason has noticed that the barrier between the two personas is different now. It used to be that, even in the field, Batman would at times slip into Bruce Wayne. Now it’s the opposite—he keeps expecting Bruce only to find Batman instead. He kneels to untie his sneakers, giving himself until he has one shoe untied before asking, “what does a threat assessment entail?” If Bruce must be Batman then he can be his closest approximation of Robin. He can treat this as a case to be solved.

“The Justice League has several levels of psychic threat assessment, if you recall, though the specific nuances of each level have likely shifted since you were last informed of the criteria. In this case, we’re looking at an intermediate assessment. Since you’d be a compliant participant, it would not involve reviewing any specific memory other than your conversation with Talia. J’onn will review your neurological landscape for any abnormalities as well as run through a series of triggers in a controlled environment, looking for any signs of subconscious conditioning.”

“How does he know what triggers to look for? Obviously there’s whatever happened with Talia, but is there a set of common phrases and actions for this sort of thing?” Jason slips his shoes off and straightens. Alfred and Bruce wear their expensive leather loafers everywhere in the Manor, but Jason’s not going to track inner city filth across the array of hand-knotted oriental carpets that adorn the Manor’s hardwood floors. Alfred might insist that wool and silk are far more durable fibers than anything synthetic, but Jason wasn’t raised in a barn.

Bruce eyes the shopping bag looped around Jason’s wrist, the sneakers hanging from Jason’s fingers, and says, “There are standard syntactic structures, and most organizations that engage in brainwashing have specific idiosyncrasies familiar to the Justice League. The League of Assassins is one such organization. Is there a reason why you’re stalling?”

“I just don’t like the idea of someone looking at my memories.”

“It’s only a single memory,” Bruce says, and something must show on Jason’s face because Bruce quickly adds, “J’onn takes confidentiality very seriously. He will not share any details with me that are not directly relevant to the threat assessment.”

And now Bruce knows Jason has things about his meeting with Talia he doesn’t want to share with Bruce. Excellent. Bruce slides his hands into the pockets of his neatly-pressed slacks and leans against the foyer wall in a parody of Brucie-style nonchalance. When next he speaks he’s careful, halting. “I must admit I am curious why you want to hide the details of your conversation with Talia so badly.”

How are you finding the city? Is it welcoming you as you hoped it would? Talia had asked and they’d both known the answer was no. It isn’t that he wants to hide the details of his conversation with Talia; he wants his conversation with Talia to have not stripped him raw the way it had. He wants to hide the truths Talia had unearthed, easy as Alfred plucking carrots from the vegetable garden a day after heavy rain. “We didn’t talk about anything, really.”

“Talia al Ghul does nothing without purpose—usually several purposes. She traveled a long way to talk with you about nothing.”

Jason does not clutch his shoes to his chest but it’s a close thing, the fight to keep his body language open and nondefensive. It’s not a fight he wins when it comes to his words. “It’s real cute how you keep pretending Talia’s the only one out to manipulate me, B.”

Bruce’s fluttering blink, artificial, conspicuous, meant to cover up his brief, tiny frown lets Jason know the barb hit home. “Whatever Talia has insinuated about me—”

“Talia didn’t insinuate shit,” he snaps, all veneer of Robin gone now. He’s just angry, messy Jason. “She didn’t have to. A sister, Bruce? You adopted another kid and you didn’t think to mention it?”

Bruce doesn’t miss a beat, which means Barbara probably told him Jason had found out and had been upset about it. He wishes he could feel betrayed by that, but he can’t even muster surprise.

“I apologize if my omission upset you,” Bruce begins in the tone of the truly unsorry, “but it didn’t seem relevant—”

“How is an entirely new family member not relevant?”

“—and in the light of the uncertain circumstances of your return—”

“You verified yourself that I’m what I say I am—”

“—please trust that I do intend to fully apprise you concerning these intervening years—”

“—and what evil could I have possibly done with the knowledge that Cassandra exists anyway—”

“—as soon as I can fully ascertain that you pose no threat—”

“When will it be enough?” Jason booms in Willis Todd’s voice. He needs to stop Bruce—Batman’s incessant fucking talking. It’s an easier question than the one he actually wants to ask, the one that’s been growing in his chest like a metastatic cancer. It’s still a question that rips out of him sharp-edged and desperate. He is uncomfortably aware that his face is hot and he’s crying again.

Bruce looks like he’s really thinking it over, which is at least something, when a soft voice says, “If I may,” and a handsome black man appears from the direction of the parlor.

“J’onn.” Bruce turns smoothly to the man, urbane and in control and confident. “We were having a private conversation.” Which is an objectively funny thing to say, considering that, even if Martian Manhunter weren’t a telepath, they’d both been yelling loud enough that they couldn’t make much of a claim to privacy, and it hadn’t really been a conversation in the first place.

“I was thinking I might talk to Jason and explain the threat assessment process in more detail, as well as explain the ethical standards to which I hold myself. I was thinking that hearing it directly from me might assuage his very reasonable concerns.” J’onn ignores Bruce, keeping his focus on Jason. His gaze is intense, but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to pick him apart like Bruce or Barbara, and it doesn’t feel like an apex predator evaluating prey, like Talia or Cassandra. Jason decides he’ll take anything vaguely ally-shaped at this point, in this whatever-the-fuck is going on between him and Bruce.

“I would appreciate that,” Jason says, and then smiles what he hopes is a winning smile. It used to be, when he was 5’2” and fourteen. He’s not sure how it looks with a day and half’s worth of stubble and the memory of a scar that cuts diagonally from the corner of his mouth back into his hairline. “I’m just going to put my shoes and stuff away.” Technically there’s a coat closet in the foyer, but it’s strictly for guests. Manor residents too often exit through windows or back doors to make keeping outerwear in the foyer very practical.

He doesn’t wait to be granted permission or acknowledgement, just jogs towards the stairs. At least one of them is drilling holes in Jason’s back with a glare, but he’s not sure if it’s Bruce or J’onn or both. He slows his gait to a steady, intentional walk.

Outside the door to his room there’s two neatly-wrapped parcels and an envelope addressed to him in Alfred’s ornate hand. He scoops the packages up, locks the door behind him, and takes three minutes to just breathe before he does anything else. His shoes go in the closet on the shoe rack, his jacket goes on a hanger to dry. Barbara’s fancy smartphone—now clad in a practical black case—comes out of the shopping bag and onto his bedside table along with its still-boxed charger. He stares at his most important purchase, a basic flip-phone from the same electronics store, paid for in cash, before sliding it into the space between his bed frame side rail and box spring. Then he pulls the business card out of his jeans pocket.

Talia must have slipped it to him at some point. He’d only come across it on the bus ride from Barbara’s place to the electronics store, when he’d been digging in his pocket for one last quarter and had discovered a thick rectangle of creamy cardstock instead. He hadn’t properly looked at it then, too aware of Oracle’s eyes. He’d paid his fare and tried not to think about it.

Now he examines it. It’s for a Layla Caputo, LCSW. There’s no practice mentioned, just a phone number with a Metropolis area code and an email. On the back, in an elegant cursive that Jason is certain would not match Talia’s natural handwriting, are the words, “For when the time comes.”

Jason runs his fingers over the embossed text. He wants to rip it up or set it on fire. Instead he slots it between the pages of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, recovered during his cleaning spree. He turns to Alfred’s packages.

They’re books, obviously, both wrapped in matte blue wrapping paper. One is thick and hefty; he can feel the edges of a hardcover through the wrapping paper. The other is smaller and lighter and probably a paperback. He slides his finger between the edges of the wrapping on the larger one, breaking the tape with his nail. He slowly unwraps the paper to reveal an expensive-looking copy of The Lord of the Rings, its pages psalter-thin and edged in red. It’s a strange gift. Alfred’s had a habit of gifting him books since he had first discovered Jason was willing to read novels that didn’t involve detectives or spies, but he knows Jason’s never cared much for fantasy. Bruce had tried reading him The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe once but hadn’t gotten past Mr. Tumnus, Jason too profoundly (and vocally) irritated by the ridiculousness of it all.

Jason sets The Lord of the Rings aside and unwraps the smaller book, which turns out to be an anthology of World War I poetry. The book is unassuming—a Penguin Classics edition with a stock photo cover and a pre-cracked spine that indicates it had been purchased used. It’s another strange gift, because while Jason likes poetry well enough, he’s always had pretty shallow taste, mostly just enjoying his school reading and not seeking it out otherwise. He’s read “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” but that’s pretty much it as far as war poetry goes and not even the right war. He’s definitely never read anything as specific as World War I poetry.

Curious, he breaks the seal on Alfred’s note. Alfred’s handwriting swoops beautifully across the light blue stationery.

Dear Master Jason,

I left her majesty’s service an angry man. Perhaps this will surprise you or perhaps it will not. At any rate, an angry soldier makes a poor civilian, and I found readjusting to civilian life difficult. These two books assisted in my transition. As the great Alan Bennet once wrote “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” These books have both reached out a hand to me when it was most needed.

I know you are not one for fantastical stories, but I think you will find Mr. Tolkien’s work illuminating on a character level, and even if you do not it is a classic of its genre and well worth your time. As for the poetry, I believe you will find the selections therein both infuriating and comforting by turns. My hope is that such a multitude of ideas will stimulate your own thoughts on the matter.

You have been a soldier yourself, and while I shall not fool myself into thinking that you intend to fall into something as simple as civilian life, coming home after a long time away is always a matter of some difficulty.

Most Sincerely Yours,
A. T. C. Pennyworth

Jason reads the letter twice. It’s the most personal Alfred has ever been with him. It feels unearned—all Jason did was take the ferry into Gotham—and then he’s angry with himself for minimizing it. He died.

“I died,” he says to the emptiness of his room. It’s the first time he remembers articulating it, either in his head or aloud. It’s so banal he wonders why he’d been avoiding it. The lights don’t dim, the ground doesn’t quake, the world around him remains silent. He laughs, short and breathy, and scrubs at the tears in his eyes. He wants to stay in his room and read into the night, to search for answers in the words of dead men, to seek a hand to reach out and take his own. But Bruce is waiting. J’onn is waiting. And Jason is still a security risk.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, he thinks wryly. Shakespeare always sounds like Dick in his head, and he wonders where Dick is in all of this. They had never been close but they had gotten along, more or less. Usually less, if Jason is being honest, but—no. It’s not important, at least not now. Once more unto the breach.

Chapter Text

         As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
         Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

The landscape painting dominates the parlor, an intricately detailed image of the St. Lawrence River cutting through thick forest, all greens and browns and frothy texture. The sky is more than half the composition, most of it a roiling storm with a sliver of clear, thin blue at the rightmost edge. Jason is trying to remember the name of the artist. He’d been a pretty big deal in his time and a close personal friend of one of Bruce’s great-great-great grand somethings.

“Thomas Cole,” he says, and both J’onn and Bruce blink. “The guy who painted that.”

A muscle in Bruce’s jaw ticks. Bruce hasn’t said a thing since Jason had sat down to a cup of cooling mint tea and a lengthy explanation of HIPAA for alien telepaths. J’onn must have told Bruce to let him do the talking, which had probably played as well as a newly-minted Nightwing telling Bruce to mind his own business.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” J’onn says, unperturbed, like Jason hadn’t responded to J’onn’s do you have any questions with a blithe non-sequitur.

“I’ve just been trying to remember the painter. It was bugging me.”

“Were you even listening?” Bruce rumbles. He’s not quite grinding his teeth yet, but it’s close. A perverse part of Jason wonders how much it would take to push him over that line.

He briefly considers channeling all of Dick’s airy charm and saying “no.” J’onn would give his excruciatingly detailed explanation again, and Bruce would either abrade his own teeth down to stumps or storm out of the room. And where would that leave Jason? Still facing the same exact thing.

He looks to the lush strokes of the painting, the storm seething over the landscape, almost moving. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. This isn’t going to go away.

“I can multitask,” and is his voice too sharp? He is not going to be angry. He is going to be the son Bruce wants. He just—he just needs to figure out who that is. This is a step; this will get him closer to the goal. “I’m ready.”

It’s a bad lie. Jason has to force it out and he can’t look at either man. There’s a scattering of islands in the center of the river and a dark smudge that almost looks like it could be a human construction. Catherine had always talked about the Gilded Age castles dotting the St. Lawrence in upstate New York, and had always wanted to take him to visit. It had never happened, but she’d kept the travel brochures on the refrigerator like a promise.

He doesn’t know how developed the area would’ve been when Thomas Cole was alive, or if the painting is even of the same area, but he imagines into that dark smudge a small hunting cabin, inhabited only in the summer by some wealthy Wayne or Kane, immortalized over a century later into a museum for the unwashed masses to wonder over.

“I think perhaps we should—”

“Jay, you don’t have to—”

“I know. I was listening. I give my fully informed consent. I understand the necessity. Do it.” He’s getting used to raising his voice to be heard. He hadn’t had the hang of it before he—died.

Martian Manhunter laces his fingers together. “Please recall your confrontation from earlier today.” It catches Jason off guard, the realization that it had only been this morning, had been less than twelve hours ago. From losing time to gaining too much, hours stretch out to feel like days, turning and turning and after so much emptiness. J’onn’s eyebrows draw together, and he realizes he’s absolutely not recalling the confrontation from earlier today. He needs to focus.

“Sometimes it helps to start from a specific sense or detail.”

His mind skips like one of those old records Catherine used to play on her ancient record player. He thinks of the cemetery, of thunder and rain, but that had been his imagination. The smell of freshly cut grass, of freshly tilled soil—that had been real, but when he reaches for that memory he overbalances and all he can think of is falling or wanting to fall.

He wrenches his mind away from that turning and turning and thinks of Talia herself, of her jerking him back from his exhumed grave. The collar of his shirt had tightened against his throat but he hadn’t fought her grip. He must’ve known, on some level, who stood behind him before he had seen her. He must’ve trusted her in some unthinking way. “Talia,” he had said, like her name was something he often said. “Talia,” and then she had read him down to the bone.

“That is exactly what I need from you, Jason. You’re doing well,” J’onn says. He blinks his eyes open, takes in Bruce’s white-knuckled grip on the rolled arms of his chair, J’onn’s severe expression, and then screws his eyes shut again. He is in the South Gotham Memorial Cemetery among the yews and oaks and Talia’s steady voice.

“You may relax your focus now. I have what I need. This will only take a moment longer.”

Jason opens his eyes and this time does not look at Bruce or J’onn but at the pair of Sargent portraits hanging over J’onn’s head. Clara Wayne is dressed in a high-necked gown of silvery blue, Henry Wayne complimenting her in a deep peacock smoking jacket. The portraits of the Wayne scion and his infamous spinster sister supposedly match, but there’s something oddly intimate about the brother’s image, a lushness to dark tones of the background, a definition to his jaw that contrasts with the brushy ease Sargent uses for Clara. Jason had always had suspicions about the set, but for all the hell he’d given Bruce before he’d died he’d never quite dredged up the courage to ask if B thought one of his illustrious ancestors might’ve had an illicit tryst with one of America’s great artists.

J’onn hums like he’s considering the question and Jason feels his face heat. He’d thought the mind-reading part of this was over.

“I apologize. If we were not connected I would not have heard, but you think very loudly.”

“So I’ve been told.” The only thing that keeps the sourness out of his voice is the way Bruce’s gaze shifts between him and J’onn. Bruce probably hates being left out of this conversation even more than Jason hates being part of it.

“How much longer?” Bruce’s entire affect is flat, but Bruce is doing his best attempt at X-ray vision through staring alone. J’onn doesn’t reply and Jason tries not to think about anything at all.

He lasts maybe thirty seconds. With his mind quieted he can feel J’onn rifling through his head. It’s like wriggling a just-loosened tooth, but he’s not the one doing it, and he’s not entirely sure where the tooth even is. He glances around the parlor gallery and sets to identifying the rest of the artists. It’s mostly portraits of Waynes past, and the Sargents are by far the most compelling ones. Some interchangeable Thomas or Henry sits opposite the Cole in an exceptionally ornate gilt frame. Jason thinks that’s the one by the same guy who’d done the Lansdowne George Washington—Stuart Gillette or Stuart Gilbert or something like that. Other portraits by less esteemed artists sit in humbler frames, and landscapes of the Hudson and the Gotham rivers take up the remainder of the space. Either Bruce or Alfred had once told him that the parlor only housed eighteenth and nineteenth century American artists, which probably spoke of exemplary wealth and patriotism to the correct audience, but Jason had always thought the brightness of a Van Gogh would’ve really livened up the place.

Van Gogh, like carnations and overly-anthologized Emily Dickinson poems, being another thing Catherine had loved that had really only served as an indicator of middle class upbringing.

“It’s done,” J’onn announces, and Jason and Bruce both jump to their feet. Jason forces himself to sit back down but Bruce remains standing.

“And?” Bruce says.

“There is nothing in your mind that makes you a threat in any way.” J’onn addresses Jason alone, like Batman isn’t looming over him, salivating for answers and two vague assurances away from dragging J’onn down to the cave for a full-on interrogation. Jason will have to find a way to send J’onn a thank-you note after this. He doesn’t think even Clark or Diana would be able to talk past Bruce and focus on him.

“There’s a but in there,” Bruce says.

J’onn turns his attention towards Bruce. “There is, but I think I would prefer to discuss it with Jason alone.” When Bruce looks ready to argue, J’onn holds up a hand. “It does not concern security or safety in any way. It is simply a matter of preference, and one that must be left up to Jason alone. I understand that you are protective of your child, but I am acting in accordance with the League code of ethics.”

Jason doesn’t think that argument is going to work, because the thing about Bruce is that he’s willing to break most rules when it suits his purposes, but then Bruce inclines his head and grunts his acknowledgment. Which yeah, flouting the Justice League code of ethics in front of another member would be a pretty big transgression, especially since Bruce wrote most of the code. Or maybe it’s actually a convincing argument, though Jason doubts that.

He thinks that’s going to be it, Batman exit stage left in a froth of wounded pride, but Bruce stops to lay a hand on his shoulder on his way out. “Thank you, Jason,” he says, making eye contact in a way that feels more than a little forced and is probably uncomfortable for the both of them. “I’m proud of you.”

Bruce is gone, the door clicking shut behind him, before Jason’s brain comes back online. I’m proud of you. How long had it been since he’d heard those words, and from Bruce? And then he’d walked away like he hadn’t just gutted him. I’m proud of you. He squeezes his eyes closed in a long blink, mouths the words one more time. Maybe Talia had pushed him into the grave and buried him and he’s dead again, maybe he never came back at all. He opens his eyes and no—parlor, J’onn, disapproving Wayne ancestors. Jason, you’re alive, Barbara had said, and he doesn’t believe in her like he used to but he had believed her then. His lungs expand and he breathes in then out then in again.

“I always thought it would be Hal Jordan or Oliver Queen who got under his skin the most, but you must drive him insane.”

His voice is distant, too-deep but weak. He wants to try again, is sure he can sound less—whatever he is right now, but J’onn’s full mouth is slanting into a smile. “Only when necessary, but yes. Batman does not enjoy having his own tools deployed against him.”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t.” Bruce likes himself best when he’s the logical counterweight to an emotional opponent. His fights with Dick had always gotten nastiest when Bruce hadn’t been able to conceive of himself that way. “So you wanted to talk?”

J’onn shifts in his chair, the first sign of discomfort Jason’s seen from him. J’onn is a shapeshifter, and though Jason’s never met him before today he knows Martian Manhunter doesn’t usually look like he does now. He wonders if J’onn is uncomfortable in a foreign skin like this, or if slipping between bodies is as natural as breathing when you’re born to it.

“For some time you were in a state of walking catatonia. You think you do not remember but you do. It is all in your mind, fragmented but present.” J’onn weaves his fingers together and rests them in his lap. “But beyond that fragmentation, your other memories, your very sense of self…I don’t have a way to explain it in words, but…”

J’onn’s just like Cassandra, Jason realizes; he, too, is speaking a foreign language. How inadequate must words seem when set against the honesty of mind touching mind? How frustrating, how tedious, must the exercise of language be when you have something like telepathy at your disposal?

Jason could offer that avenue of communication. It probably wouldn’t cost him anything, and J’onn’s been on his side this entire time. He opens his mouth to say that, but what comes out instead is, “It’s like a bomb went off and blew me apart, huh?” He’s always had a way with words.

He runs his tongue along his teeth and tastes blood. The only clock in the room is a pendulum clock that must be a century old, but Jason can see-hear-feel the numbers ticking down in his head—19, 18, 17, 16.

“That is my concern,” J’onn says, pausing the count, washing away Jason’s rancid triumph. “Your psychic fragmentation makes it difficult for you to process experiences and memories. I would normally suggest a human psychologist, but your circumstances are extraordinary and I am concerned the pace of traditional healing could be to your detriment.”

Jason swallows down a blithe quip about PTSD being a prerequisite for the mantle of Robin. Tim Drake probably would make it a lie anyway. Instead, he tries to really focus on what J’onn is saying. “Are you offering to fix me?”

J’onn doesn’t have tells the way humans do—not even minute tics or fleeting microexpressions. He remains placid and unmovable. It’s not noticeable—or at least not jarring—when the conversation is moving, but when J’onn becomes contemplative his inhumanity is apparent. Jason stops watching him in favor of trying to decipher if the red velvet chair Sargent’s Henry Wayne sits in is lurid symbolism or simple color theory when J’onn says, “I do not think that you are something to be fixed.”

“That really isn’t what you implied.”

“My apologies. That wasn’t my intent.”

I’m trying to help you. God knows why since you insist on being such a little asshole. Same sentiment, even if J’onn expresses it more neutrally than Babs ever could. He still asks, “Then what was your intent?”

“I think,” J’onn says slowly, “that continuing this line of inquiry is a poor use of your time and mine.”

It is. Why do you insist on being such a little asshole, Jason? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. “It’s Bruce, isn’t it? He thinks I’m a thing that needs to be fixed.”

“I am not about to delve into what Batman may or may not think about you, Jason.” He imagines, lets himself imagine, what it might be like to drive his fist into J’onn’s expressionless face. He imagines the crunch of cartilage, the shift in the air before J’onn sent him flying, his body on impact with the wall, the paintings falling off their hangers, frames shattering, Bruce’s rage, Alfred’s quiet disappointment, a consummation devoutly to be wished, mere anarchy loosed upon the world.

“This is about your mind and your memories,” J’onn is saying. “You are welcome to decline my guidance. Your memories will return with or without it.”

It’s funny, almost, the idea that any of this—any of him—could not be about Bruce, that there isn’t a right answer here. At least Jason knows what it is this time. Why are you such an asshole, Jason? Why are you so angry? Why is violence your first language? He doesn’t know. How did you come back? Why after all this time? Who are you now? He doesn’t know. But there’s at least this.

J’onn had sent Bruce out of the room so Jason could decide for himself, but Bruce is a feeling that lives in his head now. Panopticon Bruce. It’s funny, almost, but Jason’s not laughing. He’s not going to laugh again if he can help it.

All of this is just stalling. He always knew he was going to say yes.

“Okay. Tell me how it works.”

It works like the first successful fission bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert.

Jason wakes up with a saline drip in his arm, a catheter up his leg, and a body so strung tight with tension he gets blindsided by pain when he tries to flex his foot.

He is in his room at the Manor. The clock on his nightstand is gone. The rainbow bruise of evening is spreading out against the sky outside his window. Somewhere in the distance is the frantic beeping of a bomb about to detonate.

“Master Jason,” Alfred is saying, and he’s unhooking the heart monitor and the countdown stops.

“Can you hear me?” Bruce is saying, pressing a bandaid over the crook of his elbow.

“Cass and I were both worried,” Barbara is saying on speakerphone. He is swallowing water.

Two days, give or take. That’s what he gathers from the chattering and the fussing. They had been discussing intubation, hospitalization, long-term care. They had been scared. He gets that. He’d been scared the first time he’d seen Catherine on a vent.

And the second.

And the third.

Legally it would’ve been complicated, since he’s dead (legally), since he’s no one (legally). Legally it would’ve been a nightmare.

They’re all so, so grateful.

He’s not.

The first thing he does when he’s left alone is lock himself in the bathroom with the safety razor Alfred had provided him.

In the League he’d used a straight razor. He knows that now.

In the League Talia had taught him how to shave. He knows that too.

Ra’s had taught her, had her practice on him, a test or a dare. The first few times she’d done it for Jason and he’d held his head perfectly still and let her. Three times she’d done it, scraping the razor over his neck and cheeks, and then she’d said, “I am going to teach you to do this yourself, and then you will never let yourself be this vulnerable to someone else again.” In this memory her eyes smolder like banked embers, but he knows Talia’s eyes had only ever been hazel and human.

He will have to explain to Bruce after this. Not all of it, but he’d heard him mutter something about “having words with J’onn” and he will have to explain. This isn’t J’onn’s fault.

(We will start small with a simple, easy memory, J’onn had said. Something with which you have positive associations.)

He looks at himself in the mirror. The stubble from a few days ago is now the beginning of a beard. He traces the thin scar-memory that Talia had traced in the cemetery. The man who gave it to him almost took his eye out with a whip. That man is dead now. Another thing that Jason didn’t know but now does.

(From that memory I will help your mind draw the connections it wishes to draw. Some of those memories may be dark. If you wish to stop at any point, call out to me.)

Jason adjusts the taps until the water is lukewarm and then lathers his face. His body still aches but his hands are steady as he draws the razor down his cheek. His nose is straight when before it had been humped and crooked from being broken too many times when he was young. His cheekbones stand out sharply from the rest of his face, no longer hidden by baby fat. His ears are finally proportionate to his head. He knows where all his scars are from, but his face is still a stranger’s face.

(I will ask you once more, are you certain?)

(He had been certain.)

He washes the lather from his face and runs his fingers over the skin. He finds a rough patch and brings the razor up to take care of the spot he missed.

He had been certain.

He angles the razor so the edge is pressed against his cheek and then he digs in, takes out a little chunk of flesh, makes a new scar. The blood wells in the divot, then spills down his cheek, over his jaw, to drip onto the white marble countertop.

He had been—

—sitting cross legged in the library, spine pressed against the cool leather of a tufted chesterfield sofa. You will want to pick a room in which you feel comfortable, J’onn had suggested and he’d been only too eager to leave the parlor behind. Here, nobody is looking.

J’onn kneels before him, hands at his sides. J’onn says, “hold the memory in your head, just like before.” J’onn is here, in the library, and Jason is thinking of the slight burn of disinfectant Alfred uses for the mats and—

Jason is twelve years old and the cool air of the Cave is pimpling his skin and Bruce is wrapping his knuckles in athletic tape. Bruce’s voice is slow and deep as his heartbeat as he explains wrapping for proper form and to protect the thin skin over his knuckles. Jason says, “I’ve already got scars there,” like it’s something to be proud of, and Bruce just hums and keeps wrapping, over, under, over, under—

—over the gauze pads, tacky with blood, Catherine is tying the bandage. “Oh baby, what were you thinking?” she asks, and he was thinking that the jagged edges of the dumpster were worth the risk for the near-pristine light therapy lamp. He was thinking that if he could make Gotham a shade less gloomy then things might be better. He doesn’t say that, though, knows it’ll just make her feel guilty. When she’s through she presses a kiss against the palm of—

—his hands circle a man’s neck. He does not know his name. “Mercy,” the man gasps.

The man is pinned below him and his voice is rasping, breathless. He shifts his weight forward, pressing his thumbs into the man’s trachea. The man’s mouth falls dumbly open. “Mercy,” but the man is not looking at him.

“I am not the one you should be asking.” Talia runs her thumb over the razor edge of the throwing knife the man had launched at her. There is a line of red on her cheek, the blood just starting to bead.

The man had been meant as a teacher for him. He had tried to kill Talia instead.

“Mercy, please.” The man’s eyes meet his. They are light brown. The man’s skin is pale where it isn’t red and his face is very red. He doesn’t know anything about the man other than these things. He doesn’t think he needs to know much more about a man who tries to murder an unarmed woman.

“Thank you,” the man breathes when he loosens his grip.

Someone told him once that when fighting dirty, always go for the eyes. He doesn’t remember who that was. He doesn’t remember names anymore, other than Talia’s and, on good days, Bruce and Robin. Still, he remembers the trick with the eyes.

The man screams when he curls his fingers into the plump, soft bags of his eyes. The man screams when his eyes burst wetly under Jason’s sharp fingernails. The man screams when he digs deeper and hits bone and the man screams when he drags his head up to smash it down on the stone floor.

At some point the man stops screaming and goes still. He stands up, bare feet squelching in the lumpy tubing of what was the man’s brain. He looks at Talia.

“He underestimated you,” she says.

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

“Give me your hands,” she says.

When he does, she starts cleaning the viscera from underneath his nails with the knife the man had tried to kill her with. She is safe and he is safe and—

—he is a murderer. The thought slices through the rest of the noise. He is a murderer.

That is enough for today. J’onn’s words reverberate through him, but he is a murderer.

You were not yourself, J’onn asserts, and Jason could choose to believe him, but he—

—is watching a dirty, stinking animal plummet to his death. He is waiting for a body to cross the event horizon, for the moment when gravity wins against whatever miracle he might buy with his grapnel and the right calculus. Felipe is a smear forty storeys below by the time Batman swings onto the balcony, by the time Batman crowds him against the railing and forces Jason to crane his neck to look up—

—at one of Willis’ dirtbag buddies. “You better watch how you talk to people or someone’ll find a better use for that smart mouth of yours,” and Jason can take care of himself but Willis’ fist crashing into the guy’s rodent face is a love language all its own.

“If you ever try to touch my boy I’ll fucking kill you.”

The guy holds his hands up and lets out a low whistle. “Jesus, Will, it’s just some friendly advice. Lighten up.”

Wills knocks out both of the guy’s front teeth, and Jason knows, theoretically, that there are better ways to be loved, but that can’t stop the suffocating fondness he feels for his—

—father is dead. His killer is not. His killer is laid out on the concrete before him, concussed, blank-eyed, ready to be trussed up and sent back to Arkham to escape again, and.

Jason had stayed up all night, had spent all day in bed, thinking: about Bruce’s high ideals, about vengeance and justice, about anger and its uses. He hadn’t known, when he slid into the Batmobile, what he was going to do about Two-Face. He knows now.

Jason’s hands are small but they fit well enough around Two-Face’s neck.

“I’ll kill you,” he says, a promise. “I’ll kill you,” because Willis would have—

—sent mom’s new boyfriend through the shitty drywall of their apartment, would have beat every tooth out of his square-jawed face. This is a thing that Jason knows, even if he can’t articulate the why of it.

Chuck is helping him with his math homework, even though Jason has told him he doesn’t need help. Chuck presses his thigh against Jason’s and cups his big hand around Jason’s small one as he guides him through the problems. Jason wishes—but Chuck isn’t doing anything, not really.

Chuck’s great and he makes Catherine happy. That’s what all the neighbors say. And they’re right, Jason knows they’re right, and Chuck’s also never done anything, so Jason keeps his mouth shut and Chuck guides his hand through long division and Jason wishes, Jason wishes—

—that Bruce would stop thinking like the silver-spoon-up-their-asses trust-fund babies he runs with during his daylight hours. Or at least stop pretending he isn’t one.

“People can’t set themselves above the law. That way leads to anarchy,” Batman lectures as Jason gets lost in the clear patch of sky, brilliant stars hanging above the smog of Gotham. "Even though you and I skirt along the edges of it, we still operate within the legal system,” and Jason deserves a medal for not scoffing at that, he really does.

Even the dumbest Crime Alley brat knows that the law is either a trap or a shield, depending on how many zeroes you have in your bank account. If you have a bank account at all. Ideas like right and wrong are something else entirely. Eleven women are dead—raped, mutilated, left to rot in Gotham’s trash-heaps. The only reason the animal that did it isn’t walking free is because one of the victim’s sisters had put herself in harm’s way to take a razor blade to the fucker’s throat. I didn’t kill a man, Judy Koslosky had said when the GCPD had interrogated her, I put down a mad dog. And then, that immutable truth: it might not have been legal, but it was right.

Jason should’ve known better than to second that statement. Cue bat-sermon.

“That’s the way it has to be,” Bruce is saying. He’s limned in ambient smog-light, as distant as the clutter of stars above. “Even though more than a small part of me wishes—”

Jason stops listening. Bruce doesn’t always preach bullshit, but this time he’s really on it. Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, Bruce asks of him, but Jason won’t, can’t. There’s nothing that Bruce can say that will muddy the truth, and the triumph, because—

—he is a murderer.

The shape of the thought had been fluttery, feather-edged at first, but now it settles at the core of him, chilly and stone-solid. He is a murderer and he’d carried the seed of conviction for it since his earliest years. He cannot reject the evidence offered up by his memories; Bruce had made him too much of a detective for that. You were muted, Talia had said. You were lost. But you were yourself.

What else will Talia turn out to have been right about?

He feels J’onn trying to drag him out of the widening gyre, out of his bath water thoughts circling the drain, and back—to his body, to the forward march of time (this is too much, this may destroy you, a voice without sound, faint spiderweb vibrations, a warning, a plea) but Jason doesn’t care.

He has to know.

(How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

And human hearts in sorrow crave the more
For knowledge, though the knowledge grieve them sore.

And the eyes of them both were opened. And the Lord God sent him out of the paradise of pleasure.)

Pandora, Psyche, Adam and Eve, Bluebeard’s wives. Oedipus, Victor Frankenstein, Hamlet. Himself, a lifetime ago, with a smudged birth certificate and Willis’ little black book in hand. There’s no way this ends well for him.

Once more unto the breach, Dick sings in his memory.

He is a diver on a precipice, a missile suspended in an open weapons bay, a penny dropped from the top of a skyscraper. He is turning and turning (do not do this thing, do not, J’onn begs from the ground below) the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

He finds his mark.

(Twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last)

He plunges or dives or—

(Surely some revelation is at hand)

—drowns—

—in his own blood, his traitor lungs heaving, half-collapsed, ever-hopeful sacs. His insides are on fire but everything else is cool—the floor, the crowbar, his mother’s eyes—

—track him across the room. “Oh baby, I don’t know what I’d do without,”—

—“your loss is his failure,” Talia says, and he hears failure, failure, fail—

—“me again, and it will be all your heads,” Ra’s al Ghul says, wiping the blood from his—

—blade in his hands, sawing through ligaments, cutting the body into its component pieces as someone walks him through—

—defusing a bomb. This time his fingers work. This time the countdown stops at 27—

—26, 25, 24, 23, Jason’s hands are too ruined to—

—do anything as Shiva cuts them—

—down on the ground again, tugging cardboard over his—

—body is not his body is not his body is not—

—happening but the coffin is real and the dirt is real and—

—the hospital monitor beeps and he tries to say—

—“Bruce, please,” but there is only diminishing oxygen and—

—two hundred dollars—a week of vacuums and tires and scrap metal—

—against concrete, scraping, singing, laughing—

—murmuring while he drowns—

—making plans, not his, chess pieces—

—Lazarus waking up after four—

—3, 2—

The first detonation of a nuclear weapon, code name Trinity, was conducted at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, in the Jornado del Muerto desert. The fallout left behind a smooth, glassy residue, a light-green quartz-like compound called Trinitite or Alamogordo glass. Mildly radioactive, though more or less harmless unless ingested, it became a souvenir, then a collector’s item. The same test that had Oppenheimer calling himself death, destroyer of worlds, the same test that led to the deaths of almost a quarter of a million people, and people were clawing up the gritty pieces of slag left behind.

Jason looks in the mirror and empathizes with that fucked-up sand.

Chapter Text

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Jason drags the jab saw back and forth through the drywall, trying to stop his motions from falling into the relentless iambs of Kipling’s nationalistic war poetry. He’d asked for this, he reminds himself. He had desperately wanted something other than his own thoughts jangling around in his head. Alfred’s poems had done the trick, but him getting what he wants hasn’t been working out great lately.

He punches the jab saw through the wall to start the next line of the square. It turns out that drywall patch-jobs require cutting out the damaged material and turning the irregular gash into something geometric and neat and easy to fix. He’s absolutely not going to make a metaphor out of it.

He fumbles for the carpenter’s square to make sure he hasn’t accidentally carved a rhombus and catches Bruce lurking in the doorway of his bedroom. Which isn’t new. Two days after Jason woke up from his Martian mind-meld and Bruce hasn’t left him alone for more than thirty consecutive minutes. Not that he’s said anything of value to him in all that time, so Jason has no qualms to turning back to his project. If Bruce does want something he can knock on the doorframe or clear his throat or, god forbid, use speech like a normal person for once in his life.

The hole is square. He swaps out the saw for a utility knife for the more delicate work of cutting away the drywall over the studs. The knife is a cool lump in his hand, inelegant and unbalanced. Something rattles in the handle when he gives the knife an assessing toss before extending the blade and getting to work. The poem loops in his head. He has to fight against tapping out the meter with his foot.

“Jay,” Bruce says, causing the line Jason’s scoring in the wall to curve to the right. Jason valiantly does not curse. Instead, he looks over to Bruce, who’s holding a thick, nondescript black binder. Bruce meets his gaze solemnly and doesn’t say anything else.

Jason starts over, scores the line straight this time, clicks the knife blade longer, and drives it into the plaster. There’s less resistance than he expects; it’s easy to exert the smooth, even pressure the how-to book had described. When he’s done he turns to Bruce, who’s still not talking, and throws the thin pieces of drywall at Bruce’s feet. Bruce doesn’t react and Jason—look, it doesn’t count as giving in, he thinks, if you break the silence to go on the attack. The best defense, et cetera. He quotes:

“No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all—
One life for each to give.
Who stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?”

The rhythm forces a conviction he doesn’t feel into his voice. Jason likes reading aloud and reciting poetry. His mom—Catherine had always said he did it well; slow and serious enough to let the words sink in, but not self-important. Now, in his deeper voice, the words fall like blows, sonorous, condemning. Bruce waits in the doorway.

“Rudyard Kipling. Change out ‘England’ for ‘Gotham’ and he sounds just like you,” Jason says, with a flourish of the utility knife. Bruce shifts the binder to his other hand, but Jason, watching for his flinch, catches it. Bruce’s mouth remains pressed into a tight line.

“Are you going to use your big-boy words or are you going to keep staring?” This is very much not how Bruce Wayne’s son should act, but Bruce Wayne’s son is dealing with a Bruce Wayne who’s gone, seemingly overnight, from being a weird, standoffish cat to a kicked golden retriever. It’s driving him insane, but in a way that feels more like irritated teenager than undead murderer, so he’s taking it as a win.

“You’re upset with me,” Batman, World’s Greatest Detective, observes.

“B, I stopped closing my door because you wouldn’t stop knocking every fifteen minutes to give me updates on Alfred’s baking exploits. You have literally done nothing but hover and stare at me for two days straight. It’s annoying and it’s weird. The most normal thing about me is that I’m upset with you for it.”

Bruce considers this, or appears to. Jason thinks he might’ve actually gotten through to him, but then Bruce hefts the binder in his hand and says, “I want to bring you back to life.”

“Some unknowable power or force already beat you to that.”

“Legally, Jason.” Bruce’s hand twitches, like he’s fighting against reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t, so point to Bruce. For now.

“Yeah?” He turns to the wall but all that’s left is the detail work of measuring and cutting the drywall patch. “How’d I die in the first place anyway?” He asks, running his finger over the textured edge left by the saw.

Bruce is silent for so long that Jason has to look to make sure he’s still there. He is, slouched against the doorframe. “You know better than I do,” he says. His gaze is glassy, oriented vaguely towards the open window. Like Catherine. It’s past noon already, but for a flickering moment his room is bathed in the golden colors of the sunrise she’d loved so much. Oh baby, you should see the sky where I grew up, bluer than the ocean and endless. She’d promised to take him to Florida one day, to her parent’s tile-roofed ranch in Sarasota, with its courtyard stuffed full of palm trees.

The first palms he’d ever seen were from when he was fifteen, flying into Beirut to look for a woman who might’ve been his mother.

He swallows, and suddenly the chaos of his room comes into focus—the furniture clustered in the center of the space, draped in drop-cloths, the white-primed walls swatched with an indecisive rainbow of paint, power tools and ladders and saws and knives untidy on the ground despite his best efforts. He dusts his hands against his jeans. “We’re not doing this here.”

“Is there someplace you’d prefer?”

There isn’t, really. He doesn't particularly want to pollute another room in the Manor he actually likes with a conversation that may or may not turn rancid. He also—this is going to be miserable, and he wants Bruce to be as uncomfortable as he himself will be. And there’s really only one no-man’s land in the house that will put them on equal, wretched footing.

Bruce follows him down the hall but starts to protest when Jason wrenches the door open. “This is Dick’s—”

“Do not,” Jason says, voice low, “lecture me about privacy.” The effect is almost lost when he nearly trips on a pair of compression pants. Jason kicks them into a mostly-empty hamper surrounded by mostly-dirty clothes. It’s amazing how Dick’s room has always managed to be a disaster area despite Dick never actually living in the Manor when Jason’s been around. It’s still very much Dick’s childhood bedroom, same circus posters and plastic stars, but there’s an up-to-date calendar of Gotham Gazette editorial cartoons and a handful of pictures of the Titans, older and in civvies, pinned to the walls. Dick’s traded out his colorful quilt for a more sedate navy duvet, which is wadded up at the foot of his bed, half of it slumped on the floor, because Dick is the worst.

He’s weirdly relieved by the proof of life. He’d almost been afraid Dick had somehow died when he wasn’t looking, he’s been so absent from, well, everything.

Jason wrenches the abused duvet up over Dick’s wrinkled sheets while Bruce stands by uselessly. “Tell me your version. How does the public think your kid died?” He jabs the edges of the duvet under the mattress and then throws himself onto the too-soft bed. He claims the superior sightline and back support by shoving himself against the headboard, the hard, dark wood knocking into his shoulders.

“Why don’t you tell me instead?” Bruce shifts his weight back and forth before toeing off his loafers and padding over to sit cross-legged on the bed. The mattress dips sharply under his weight, and a frown flickers across his face. Jason helpfully chucks a pillow at him. Bruce tucks it underneath himself and then breathes in, resting his hands on his knees, serene as a Bodhisattva. “Assume that I took measures to hide anything leading back to Batman. Assume that the best lies are based in truth. Be sure to consider Ethiopia’s precarious relationship with Eritrea after the Algiers Agreement and the Islamic extremists operating out of Somalia. Recall the political atmosphere of 2002, and how necessarily high-profile the death of American billionaire Bruce Wayne’s son would have been.”

Jason rolls his eyes like a teenage shithead because Bruce doesn’t need to spell it out for him that much; he can imagine. A dead American boy on foreign soil, and plenty of angry US soldiers waging war one peninsula away. He’d died in eastern Amhara, fairly far away from the Somali border, but that wouldn’t have stopped an unscrupulous government official wanting to leverage US jingoism to wipe out their own Islamist interlopers. Or a revanchist splinter-group eager to construct some Eritrean freedom fighters with a grudge. “It had to be obvious the Joker’d done it. Anything else—any ambiguity, any uncertainty, any other party blamed—god, it could’ve sparked another war.”

“Yes,” Bruce says heavily. His fingers curl into loose fists, then uncurl. Jason watches the movement, waits for him to curl his fingers again but he doesn’t. He forces himself to breathe. “Luckily there was ample evidence of the Joker’s involvement—crates of venom, hired thugs, reams of paperwork.”

“And whatever evidence there wasn’t Batman manufactured.”

Bruce inclines his head. “Keep going.”

Memories surge in his mind—Sheila’s eyes, blue like Catherine’s Florida sky, the skittering movements of scrubland reptiles seen in his periphery, the diesel reek of old Humvees. Jason isn’t there, though. Jason is half-sunk into Dick’s oversoft mattress, in a messy childhood bedroom he’s only been in a handful of times, at Wayne Manor. He runs his hand over the duvet, feeling the smooth sateen weave catch on the callouses and scars of his palm, diminished though they are.

The best lies are based in truth. Bruce thinks he’d taught Jason that, but Jason had learned that lesson long before he’d ever laid eyes on the Batmobile tires. “You kept the story about looking for my mother.”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, Bruce, how did the DCF ever let you adopt another kid after I ran off and got myself blown up?”

“I.” Bruce picks up the binder that he’d set to the side and slides his finger along the plastic seams. “Surely you aren’t interested in the PR specifics.”

It’s not quite a question but it’s close to one. Jason doesn’t know the answer, though the fact that Bruce doesn’t seem to want to talk about it makes him more inclined to say that yes, actually, he is. He can ask—it’d be a distraction from the first steps of bringing Jason Peter Todd back to life, a proposition he’s fairly ambivalent on. But he’s not quite willing to derail the most honest moment he’s had with Bruce since coming back, whatever else it also is, so he shrugs and says, “Put a pin in it, I guess.”

Bruce grants him another magnanimous nod. “Alright.”

“So I go to Ethiopia for Sheila. It’s still the clown who murders us—me. But why? Why Jason Todd? I know I didn’t die as Robin.” He doesn’t think even Bruce, at his most charismatic, could’ve plausibly explained why his son had been beaten to death and blown up in a warehouse in Africa while wearing a Robin uniform.

Which means someone—Bruce—had needed to change him out of his Robin uniform. “What clothes did you put me in anyway?” His voice sounds distant, like he’s far away and moving farther. “My regular clothes wouldn’t have been damaged in the blast.” Here he goes again—asking a question he already knows the answer to.

Bruce doesn’t attempt to disguise his pain, just closes his eyes and clenches the binder in white-knuckled hands. Pain, and, if the tightness in his mouth is any indicator, self-loathing.

Jason doesn’t know if he believes in God. Catherine had. Willis hadn’t, at least by the time Jason came around. “We’re just meat, in the end,” Willis had been fond of saying. He’d go to Holy Trinity, his parent’s church and his parent’s parent’s church, take communion, volunteer for the fish fry, and shrug off any touch of spiritualism. “There’s nothing that comes after this. We’re just meat.”

Jason had tried believing that, when he’d found Catherine for the last time, when he’d stumbled across Ronny’s thawing corpse one spring, when he’d found Gloria dangling from a ceiling beam. Ignore the body, empty of human life, stripped of dignity. Just meat. Just meat.

He imagines Bruce shucking Robin’s colors off his graying corpse, leaving him bare and broken in the wreckage of the warehouse. It’s an eminently practical solution to an intractable problem, the shortest distance between Point A, Jason’s traffic-light corpse, and Point B, the sanctity of the mission. He’d basically been flank steak at that point anyway, and whatever a cow may think or feel while it tramps through a field, by the time it’s flank steak there’s no reason to care about what it had once been.

“It’s fine,” he reassures Bruce, because he’d been dumb and senseless as ground meat in a butcher shop window, because it hadn’t mattered, because Jason understands necessity, utility. He can see distress creeping up on Bruce in his forehead wrinkles. He says, more firmly, “I understand. It’s fine.”

“It isn’t,” Bruce says, low and fierce. “God, Jason, nothing about this is fine. I wish—”

“We both wish it had never happened.” Pressure builds in the center of his face, making his head feel heavy. His hands are starting to ache. Bruce seems to wish for a lot of things, but he wonders—Jason wonders if he were actually given a choice, Jason or his parents or all crime in Gotham, what he’d actually choose. He immediately tries to drown the thought. Of all the answers he’s still waiting on from Bruce, that’s one he never wants to hear.

“This was too much,” Bruce says from a distant room, Bruce says from right in front of him.

“I can handle it.”

“Jason…”

“I’m not made of glass.” It’s more of an aspirational statement than a true one, but Jason’s earned a degree of indulgence. Probably.

“Okay,” Bruce says, but Jason knows when he’s a hair’s breadth from being benched. Not that Bruce could really do anything to stop him from ruminating on his untimely demise. Not that Bruce probably wouldn’t try to stop him in an invasive and excruciating way.

He pushes the air out of his lungs in a long, loud sigh and shifts his legs so he’s sitting cross legged as well. He lets his head thunk back against the solid headboard and stares at the senseless constellations of Dick’s ceiling. Maybe he should invest in some glow-in-the-dark stars as well. Or a mural. Something. “You identified the—my body?”

“I did.”

“And performed my autopsy?”

Bruce is silent for a moment. Jason can’t see him, but when he starts talking again his tone is sour. “No. I went to the embassy. They suggested that the Ethiopian authorities perform the autopsy. And when the remains were repatriated, I requested that the state of New Jersey perform a second autopsy. I wanted there to be no doubt.”

Jason isn’t sure, for a moment, what Bruce means by that last bit, and then it occurs to him and he turns his head so he can slant an unpleasant smile at Bruce. “I was that unpopular, huh? The public just assumed Gotham’s prince had buyer’s regret and had concocted some Wile E. Coyote scheme to have his charity case offed overseas?”

Bruce’s eyes are an unforgiving January morning. “There were rumors. I wanted there to be no doubt.”

“They put you through a lot of shit, huh?” A part of him is irritated at consoling Bruce for his own death. A greater part of him wants to hunt down anyone who even insinuated his dad would’ve done something like that and break their fucking kneecaps. The greatest part of him—had Bruce, caught up in his own grief and the media storm, ever realized that Jason hadn’t been worth it?

“Whatever you’re thinking, stop.” Bruce’s hand on his wrist is so warm. Jason looks down. There are new scars crisscrossing old, familiar ones there. His grip is firm but not tight.

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” he tries to front.

“Do you think I don’t hear how you talk about yourself? Jason, look at me.” The command has enough Batman in it to drag Jason’s eyes back up to Bruce’s open, earnest face. “You are more than the circumstances of your birth. You are my son. Losing you was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Getting you back is a miracle.”

Bruce speaks with the same heartbeat-certainty of Kipling’s iambic trimeter; his voice rings with authority. Jason doesn’t know if he believes in God or even Batman but here, on Dick’s lumpy duvet, with Bruce’s thumb pressed into his pulse, he believes in Bruce Wayne. Jason allows himself four breathes, four, of being struck sense-dumb, overwhelmed by a feeling of something broken slotting home, before he spackles a Robin grin on his face and says, “So my death was too well-documented to try a ‘reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’ bit?”

Bruce doesn’t laugh, but there’s a telling crinkle at the corner of his eyes. “You’re aware that’s a misquote,” he says, withdrawing his hand to finally open Pandora’s binder of mysterious paperwork. Jason feels unmoored without the shackle of Bruce’s grip around his wrist. He watches as Bruce flips through reams of official-looking papers without any clear goal.

“That said, there are certain gaps in the record of your …” Bruce flips through the papers with even less purpose than before.

“Death. It’s not a bad word.” Jason isn’t going to let it be.

“Death,” Bruce echoes shallowly. “Your autopsies were well-documented but—”

“It doesn’t have to have been my body. It could’ve been someone else. You assumed the corpse was mine because—” and he gets caught here. Why would Bruce assume?

“Sheila Haywood said it was you with her. Her last words. There was no reason to doubt.”

“Right. Of course.” Sheila had looked like an old-fashioned movie star, all blonde curls and Florida-sky eyes, cigarette in her unbroken fingers, gun in her pocket, crisp white button up despite the dirt and heat and misery. No reason to doubt someone like her. Jason hadn’t. He swallows. “So whose corpse did you mistake for mine?”

“A John Doe.”

“I meant—” he squeezes his eyes shut and Bruce’s hand is around his wrist again. Ignoring the dramatic scaffolding around the event, the fact that if they go with this story it means his death was a set-up just to fuck with Bruce, that he’s going to have to have been kidnapped or tortured or something, there’s this one flat, inescapable fact. “There has to be an actual body. You can’t hide that there isn’t a body.” Finding a body to fill his grave won’t be hard—they’re a dime a dozen across Gotham, thick on the ground in the East End. They have the tools to age a corpse appropriately. A John Doe. Jason remembers—

—knowing. He has a name, a home, a father. He knows the letter B. His mouth moves, the stupid drag of his tongue slurring ungainly vowels. He knows, but the person in front of him does not. “Brain damage,” they say. “John Doe,” they say. I am someone, he knows but cannot tell. Please, don’t, I am—

—breathing, oxygen forced into his lungs through a tube down his throat. Mouth hangs open. Eyes moving, lids too heavy to lift. Words, just a few. Doctor, nurse: six months, end of life, unidentified, John Doe—

—doesn’t talk,” the man with the green beanie is saying, “but he’s alright. Knows these streets like the back of his hand.” Someone laughs, asks who he is, and the man with the green beanie shrugs. “Some John Doe. Does it matter? He’s useful.” He’s useful. He knows. He knows the letter B, and that once he had—

“Jason,” and Bruce’s face is too close to his, Bruce’s fingers bruising around his wrists. Bruce's eyes are blue edging into gray, each furrow of his iris neat and ordered, like everything else about him. Bruce’s eyes are blue, but they’re nothing at all like Sheila’s, a cold river to a summer sky.

Jason opens his mouth to tell Bruce that he hears him, but what comes out is: “I don’t want a stranger in my grave.”

“Jason, what are you talking about?” Bruce says in the voice he uses for scared children and spooked animals and Jason isn’t that. He isn’t.

“Stop coddling me.” He jerks his wrists against Bruce’s grip. Bruce immediately lets go.

“Jason, you’re having a panic attack.”

“I just don’t want a stranger in my grave. Is that so much to ask?” Jason opens his mouth and takes a gasping breath. Water doesn’t rush into his lungs.

“No, it isn’t, but I wasn’t suggesting such a thing in the first place.”

Bruce is being obtuse on purpose. “Then how? You need a body. How?”

“Jason—”

“Stop saying my name!” Jason shrieks, expelling the water that isn’t there from his lungs. He doesn’t sound like Willis, or like Catherine or like Sheila. He sounds animal, hysterical. He catches his equally-hysterical laugh before it slips out, but it’s not enough. He and Bruce look at each other in mutual shock.

“Okay,” Bruce says, folding his hands in his lap. Jason notes, idly, that the toe of Bruce’s right sock is wearing thin. He wonders what happens when Bruce wears through his socks. Catherine had always cut theirs up for rags, but he can’t imagine Alfred doing the same. Maybe that’s unfair of him. Is reverse-classism a thing?

“How about,” Bruce says, and he’s unfolded his hands to turn a tab in his binder. He reveals a glossy brochure for Gotham University, “we talk about once you’re back? You should achieve your GED in the next few months, meaning you can apply to GU or Rutgers-Gotham for the spring semester. Or you could take some courses at GSCC so you can start college next fall, with the rest of the students.” Bruce pushes the binder into his hands and Jason lets him. He runs his finger down the meticulous tabs: rescinding the death certificate, reinstating insurance coverage, obtaining his GED, applying to college. Jason flips past the GU brochure. Bruce has compiled profiles on faculty of interest at each school along with exhaustive metrics on admissions, academic rigor, student life, and extracurriculars. The marketing materials for each school show an appropriately diverse mix of young people talking about how college changed their life.

Jason tries to imagine himself on a sunny campus with a sprawling green, pretending like the most exciting thing about him is his interest in Victorian-era female novelists and—he can’t. He doesn’t want to.

Bruce hums a disapproving noise as Jason flips away from the college section. The miscellaneous paperwork tab details the process for getting his driver’s license and renewing his passport. The health section has notes on necessary checkups, missed vaccines, and meal plans, but nothing about the conditioning necessary to maintain his body for vigilante work. The absence becomes more glaring the more he looks.

“What about Robin?”

Bruce stills into solid rock. “What about Robin?”

Jason swallows. He has to get this exactly right, has to mean his words but can’t tip his hand. He also must, must draw some kind of blood from Bruce, too. He can’t be the only one bleeding about this. “If I’m coming back then Robin is too.” Jason feels like a fool, like an idiot liar, because Bruce has to know that he knows at this point, he has to, but he keeps going anyway: “you’ve been on your own for years out there.”

Jason should have checked the photos around Dick’s room to see if Tim Drake features in any of them. Maybe he’s watching all of this from one of Dick’s glossy snapshots, chin tilted up and proud, Dick’s hand on his shoulder. At this moment it almost feels as if the boy himself is present in the room. Jason wouldn’t be surprised if Tim Drake burst through the door and inserted himself into this drama. He’s certainly inserted himself into the rest of Jason’s old life.

“I’m not alone,” Bruce says finally, and Jason thinks, for one stupid, wishful second that this is it, that Bruce is going to finally be fucking honest with him, and then: “I have Batgirl.”

“But not Robin. Not a partner.”

“Robin,” and Bruce’s voice is quiet but anvil-hard, words clipped, precise, inexorable, “died in a warehouse in Ethiopia four years ago.”

Jason almost gives up the game right there, almost laughs or screams or shrieks, almost kicks out to land a foot against Bruce’s jaw, to shut him up, to beat the truth out of him, something. But he learned patience from Catherine Johnson, who could sit through hours of Willis or Marguerite from next door spewing bullshit just to catch them out in a lie, who would sit with Jason for hours and read to him or listen to him read and hang on every word. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay?” Bruce echoes.

“Sure. Robin is dead. Jason Todd isn’t. I understand.” He wonders how long Bruce thinks he can keep Robin’s very-much-aliveness a secret, if he’s going to edit every newspaper Jason might read, every website Jason might stumble across. If he wants to be fair—and he doesn’t, not right now—Bruce probably has no idea what he’s doing. If there’s a way this ends happily then Jason can’t see it and Bruce probably can’t either.

“You’re still my son. That’s more important than Robin could ever be,” and Bruce says it like he really, truly believes it, like being just Jason and Bruce could ever hope to compare to being Batman and Robin. Jason scrabbles for the certainty of minutes ago, the unshakeable belief in Bruce Wayne, but all he can think of is the fact that Bruce called him “Robin” months before he ever called him “son.”

“Okay,” he says again, voice starting to split towards tearful. He reminds himself this isn’t the first time he’s lost Robin, that he’s known it isn’t a thing he could have back, that he doesn’t even want it back, but he wants, he wanted—no.

“I’ll give you some time. To review those documents.” Bruce’s own voice sounds off. Jason isn’t looking at him.

“Okay.”

“I’m pleased to have you home, lad,” Bruce says.

He can’t even muster another broken-record okay to that. Review those documents isn’t an order and Jason isn’t Robin, but Bruce is still Batman and Jason finds it easier to flip back to the college marketing materials than to come up with an alternative. Your future starts here, insists Gotham University. Rugters-Gotham more humbly suggests that he Discover what moves you. GSCC is vaguer still, its front page stamped with the words Connection. Conviction. Community. Jason scrubs his hands over his face and through his hair. He needs to shave again. He still needs a haircut.

Bruce is gone.

He should want this.

Catherine had always said he’d find himself at college, especially when he came home from school fuming and frustrated after getting into a fight with some class bully. She’d said her own years at GU were some of the best, had been talking about extracurriculars and scholarships before he’d even been able to read. Willis had had nothing good to say about the white-collar elites pushing paper in the Diamond District but had insisted that Jason was going to be the first Todd to get a college education anyway. Willis had stuck his spare change in a coffee can and called it Jason’s college fund. The money had gotten spent quick once Willis was gone, when it was just Jason and Catherine and the remorseless gravity of life in Park Row. Jason had given up on college when he’d spent the $87.50 saved up in the can. He’d given up on middle school pretty quick after that.

And then Bruce had found him, made him stupid with dreams. College became not just a distant improbability but an Ivy-League inevitability. And Jason—Jason had wanted, had daydreamed about late nights studying in dusty stacks, about laughing with friends in crowded dining halls, about speaking and his accent not immediately marking him out as Gotham street trash. He’d wanted that future, but in an abstract, distant way. He’d only been a high school sophomore. He’d had time.

He wonders if he’s going to be expected to incorporate whatever tragic backstory Bruce comes up with into his admissions essay. I first realized that my future began at Gotham University when the Somali terrorist cell that had captured me began to systematically remove my fingernails. No. A terrorist organization having captured him presented the same geopolitical issues as anyone other than a home-grown genocidal maniac killing him. Maybe the amnesia angle? That was closer to the truth, anyway. I decided I wanted to discover what moves me at Rutgers-Gotham when I rediscovered my name and identity after seeing Bruce Wayne’s face on the cover of Vogue while I was wandering Cairo. Of course, constructing an entire four years of amnesiac wandering was daunting in its own way. At least if he was feigning captivity and torture he only had to pretend to have been in one place. Maybe the truth was best? Like Gotham State Community College, the League of Assassins also values connection, conviction, and community.

It’s a joke, it is, but then he’s hearing Talia in his head, her voice effortlessly dancing between ancient Greek, modern Arabic, and English as she reads Aristotle’s Politics to him. He sharpens an armory of blades and she runs her fingers through his hair. It had been like that often, in the League; sometimes the rise and fall of Talia’s voice had been the only thing that could draw him to the surface of himself. She hadn’t tried to cater to his interests, had simply read whatever she found engaging aloud to him. Aristotle and al-Farabi, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, the Tanakh and Talmud. He had known very little Arabic, and no Hebrew or Greek, but the memories of those languages are there, now, if he reaches for them.

Between her and Bruce and the streets of Gotham itself he wonders what any of these schools could hope to teach him. He wonders if it’s anything he could hope to learn without instead being drawn back into dim, candlelit evenings and Talia’s voice flowing cool and smooth over philosophy, politics, poetry.

Jason shuts the binder and stands. Dick’s room doesn’t have a clock, but though the overcast light through the blinds doesn’t seem to have shifted much, Jason can’t help but feel he’s lost time. He’s about to leave the room, abandoning Bruce’s unwanted binder of plans, when his eye catches on a series of honest-to-God polaroids pinned to the corkboard above Dick’s messy desk.

Dick hangs upside-down from one of the big old trees that dot the Manor grounds. His smile is warm and open and easy in a way that Jason recognizes from photos but he’s never seen himself. In the next photo, Dick swings towards the photographer as the photographer holds out a blurry hand in the foreground, attempting to ward him off. The next picture is just out-of-focus hands and grass and knees, the one after that an upside-down image of a slim dark-haired boy hiding his face in his hands. Then there are a few shots of Dick and the boy making scrunched faces at the camera, grinning stupidly, arms around each other’s shoulders. The final picture, clearly taken by someone with a steadier hand, shows Dick and the other boy sprawled on the grass in a pile of limbs, both of them asleep. That’s the most obvious set of pictures featuring Tim Drake, but once he starts looking he finds him everywhere—most of the big group shots of the Titans feature Dick and Tim standing near each other. There’s a shot of Dick and Tim and Bruce playing what looks like monopoly, a polaroid of Dick and Tim and Barbara and Cassandra in a park, a strip of photo booth pictures that feature Tim and Dick trying to shove each other out of the frame, and even an awkward wallet-sized school photo of Tim Drake in a stiff button-up, hair gelled into unmoving waves, posed in front of a generic marbleized backdrop. Jason unpins that last one and flips it over. The handwriting on the back is unselfconsciously messy. It reads: To my favorite brother. From your biggest fan. It’s signed TJD, like a douchebag. Jason shoves photo and pin back into the corkboard. He counts his breaths. Dick—

—grinning like a showman, setting his arm next to Jason’s to compare the matching gashes left by Killer Croc’s teeth. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” he recites brightly, “For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother,” as their mingled blood drips—

—down his wrist, over his fingers. Talia’s own fingers curl around his forearm, her nails digging into the edge of the wound that their attackers gave to him. Her own palm is bleeding. She intones, “for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother,” and everything about this moment is a promise—

—that Dick made, to answer if he called. Jason folds the business card with Dick’s number on it in half, then into fourths. He unfolds it. He dials the number but doesn’t press the call button. He refolds the business card, then flips the phone closed. He doesn’t—

—think about Talia’s business card, pressed between the pages of The Tenant. He doesn’t want to think about Talia at all. He tries to remember the one time Dick came to dinner at Wayne Manor, the tense meal with Bruce, the catharsis of the zombie movie marathon afterward, but all he can think of is the smell of food heavily spiced with za’atar, the servant who tasted each dish before he or Talia ate from it. He tries to remember the ski trip with Dick, but when he imagines snow it’s the Alps he’s flying over in a helicopter with Talia. He clutches for other memories, anything. Dick is so present in his mind, but when he sits and tries to count out the time he spent with him he doesn’t even need both hands.

Antigone understood, Talia had said, a husband or child could be replaced but a brother lost is a wound that doesn’t heal. She had read him the great Greek dramatists one winter. When she’d gotten to that part, to Antigone’s last speech, she’d shut the book and been quiet for a long time before resuming.

That kind of thinking, that high-minded tragedy, was only for blood family anyway. A brother-in-arms or an adopted son—Jason understands that both of those are replaceable roles. Or maybe it had just been him and his inborn defect he hadn’t known was there but everyone else had seemed to have been able to see. He thinks—

—of a hotel room in Italy, of Talia perfectly composed in a tailored jacket and elegant heels, of her saying, “We have almost concluded our business here, but you should know that our contact is operating outside of the League’s purview to traffic children. You do not have to concern yourself with it. If you don’t, I will. But you have a choice.”

It is not quite an order, but it is not quite a choice either. Later, after Jason has concerned himself with it she inclines her head and says, “Well done,” and Jason—

—needs to get his head on straight. He needs—to not be in Dick’s room, first of all. He doesn’t slam the door to Dick’s room shut, but the door to the guest room he’s squatting in is fair game. He jerks it open hard enough that the handle bangs against the wall. The cellphone Barbara gave him is sitting on the nightstand, next to the analog clock it always takes him an embarrassingly long time to read. It’s 4:03 PM. Jason waits until it’s 4:05 and then hits Barbara’s contact information.

She answers on the third ring. “Hello, Jason,” she says with a kind of toneless self-assurance that sets his teeth on edge.

“I need to get in contact with J’onn.”

“Why don’t you ask Bruce? They’re colleagues.”

If Jason finds his own affected ignorance distasteful, on Barabara “Oracle” I-see-everything Gordon it’s criminal. He swallows down a you know why and goes for needling her instead. “Are you telling me you can’t find his information?”

“I didn’t say that,” Barbara says, not quite snapping but close enough that Jason feels it counts. “I said you should ask Bruce.”

“Do you like asking Bruce for favors he’s not going to grant?” He hasn’t explained about what happened with J’onn and his few prodding mentions of the telepath have evoked nothing but scowls and silence from Bruce. Babs has to know this.

“Jason,” she says, voice going kind and faux-sympathetic in a way that’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand. He doesn’t want to hear it. He hangs up on her before she can say anything else.

He was doing fine with this, with all this, before Bruce dragged him away from his home reno project and into his Byzantine plans for Jason’s future. He doesn’t need Bruce or Barbara or J’onn J’onzz. He just needs a carpenter’s square and a box cutter and an achievable goal.

He can do this.

He cannot, in fact, do this.

Jason looks around his disaster of a room, at the primer drying over the swatches of paint he’d decided, two hours ago, were unforgivably hideous, at the discarded drywall patches he keeps cutting too small. Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair, he thinks as he shoves his nightstand closer to the furniture clustered in the center of the room. His foot lands on a curved shard of brittle black plastic and it’s a small miracle that the string of curses he lets loose doesn’t call up Alfred, or the disapproving ghosts of Thomas and Martha Wayne, or some other specter of etiquette past.

He picks up the fragment of plastic. It’s recognizable, barely, as the shell of his alarm clock. He’d wondered, when he’d woken up from his Martian-induced coma, where it had gone. He wants to think it had just been knocked off its perch in an accident of flailing arms. He knows—well, it isn’t like he hadn’t thought about breaking the thing down into its component parts every time he’d looked at the numbers and seen something else instead. It doesn’t surprise him that, at some point, half-mad with too many memories, he might’ve shattered it—rage or fear, some twist of both. The fact that he doesn’t remember, when he feels like he remembers everything else—that’s what makes his stomach start to heave against his ribcage.

It isn’t your tendency towards violence that concerns me, Talia had once said. It’s that your anger or your fear—and truly, they are not meaningfully different—supersedes your control. We must do better. Talia’s phantom fingers run through his hair. He tries to replace the memory with one of Bruce, but all he can feel is Bruce’s fingers twisted in his cape, Bruce accusing him of treating Robin like a game, Bruce calling him emotionally compromised, angry, violent, crazy, and then—falling action. A trans-atlantic flight, Israel, Lebanon, and Ethiopia. Mother, crowbar, bomb.

He shakes the burning warehouse out of his head. Fine. He needs help with this. He needs to talk to J’onn, to figure out how to undo this insistent kaleidoscope of unwanted memory. And if neither Barbara nor Bruce are going to help him, well. Jason had grown up learning the only person he can rely on is himself.

It’s a lesson he never should have forgotten.

It’s 6:30. Bruce will be napping. Alfred will be preparing dinner. Slipping into the Cave should be easy enough, and it’s not like Jason has never scoured Bruce’s supercomputer for information he isn’t supposed to find.

No one lives in the hall that houses his room. Dick’s room is empty, and the guest suites that make up the rest of the wing are unoccupied, unless Tim Drake is hiding in one. He doesn’t bother to step carefully until he starts making his way down the stairs. He remembers which floorboards creak and he steps over them easily with his longer legs. The kitchen is tucked away towards the back of the first floor, but Jason can see the warm spill of light, hear the grainy hum of the radio Alfred listens to while he cooks. He almost turns towards it. He’s never felt close to Alfred before, but he thinks—no. It’s Jason alone in his tangle of a mind. He slips into Bruce’s study.

He almost expects an alarm to go off when he adjusts the hands on the grandfather clock, but the secret door swings open like nothing has changed. He looks into the dimly-lit passage. Bruce took him this way when he first came back to the Manor a week ago, but he’d been blindfolded, exhausted, and, yeah, scared. Stepping onto the stairs now, eyes open, goal in mind, is like stepping four years into the past.

He’s halfway down the Cave stairs when a hand—Bruce’s—catches his shoulder from behind and jerks him around, shoving him into the wall. The Cave shadows deepen and distort the lines and creases in Bruce’s face, rendering him grotesque. His voice is rough when he demands, “What are you doing?”

“I thought I had free rein.”

“Of the Manor, not the Cave.”

There’s the proof, then, that Bruce means all his utter bullshit about Robin being dead. Jason’s going to be cut completely out of the life, and fuck him if the excision leaves behind space he can’t fill. Jason fumbles for some kind of response, something about Bruce being a liar or an idiot or a fool, something to hurt, but Bruce is talking before Jason gets a chance to say anything at all.

“Barbara contacted me. She mentioned you were trying to get in contact with Martian Manhunter.”

Jason had been expecting this. He knew Barbara was going to tell Bruce about his call, knew this conversation was inevitable. It still stings. “I wanted—” no. The last thing he needs to talk about is wanting.

It doesn’t matter. Bruce doesn’t wait for him to finish his thought. “Jason, he put you in a coma.”

“That isn’t—”

“You were screaming. You were screaming and seizing and bleeding from your nose and your ears and—Jason, you don’t understand what it was like, how terrifying it was. J’onn J’onzz did that to you. I cannot trust him to operate appropriately any longer. I plan to have the League review—”

“What the fuck?” Jason’s voice is so high when it’s shocked out of him that it almost sounds like it might break. He swallows and tries to even his words out. “He didn’t—He didn’t hurt me, B. He didn’t cause the seizures or the bleeding or—”

“Well,” Bruce says primly, sounding a bit like Alfred at peak crisp disapproval. “He certainly did something. You didn’t just start having violent convulsions out of nowhere.”

This is not the place to be having this conversation. The Cave stairs are solid but narrow and the lighting makes it hard to read Bruce’s face. Bruce, standing two steps up from him, looms forebodingly. Jason isn’t afraid of Batman or Bruce Wayne but he still feels small and dumb and fresh off the streets when he says, “B, J’onn didn’t do that. I did that. He just. Wasn’t able to stop me.”

Bruce takes his hand off his shoulder. Carefully, he asks, “What?”

Jason should have had this conversation earlier. Jason doesn’t want to have this conversation at all. But he recognizes necessity. Eventually it always comes down to necessity. He starts down the Cave stairs again, talking as he goes. “J’onn took me into my own head. Like that mind palace exercise you used to have me do, but weirder. And I was supposed to start small, with just one memory, then chain it together with whatever that first memory brought up, like some kind of free association. He said we’d do multiple sessions and slowly piece it all back together.”

Jason reaches the bottom of the stairs and turns to watch Bruce descend. He feels untethered, in a way, like his mouth is moving without his permission. He feels like he’s falling without a grapnel. “But I remembered this one thing and. Well. It’s better to rip the bandaid off quick, right? And so instead of calling it a day I decided to just. Dive. To get it over with. And in that place J’onn had no power to stop me. He told me not to. I did it anyway.”

Bruce stops on the second to last step to stare at him. His expression isn’t cold, isn’t thunderous, isn’t anything at all really. “I almost lost you,” he says, blank. “Again.”

“You didn’t. I was fine.”

Jason doesn’t think Bruce can hear him. “You were in a coma for two days. I almost lost you just after getting back because you are still a foolhardy, reckless child who never listens. Why do you never listen?”

Jason recoils. “What.”

But Bruce is vexed to relentless, unforgiving speech, his words a boulder rolling down a mountain. Unstoppable. “You don’t listen, not to me, to Alfred, to Dick. And now not to J’onn. You walk through life like you think you’re invulnerable and then you take unacceptable risks. You shattered your own mind. You took on the Joker when I explicitly told you to not, Jason.”

“That.” Fossil fuel reek, Humvees, parched air. Mother, crowbar, bomb. Long gone. Nothing to worry about. He’d thought it was safe. If Bruce thinks—well, if Bruce thinks that shit about him he isn’t entitled to the truth. “That isn’t what happened.”

“That is exactly what happened.”

“I was trying to save my mother!”

“That woman,” Bruce roars, “was not your mother.”

Everything echoes strangely in the Cave—whole words become pure sound. Bruce’s roar dislodges a fluttering of bats from some distant recess, and they flee overhead in a chittering mass. For the second time today, Jason and Bruce stare at each other in mutual shock.

Catherine was my real mother, is what Jason wants to say. Catherine, despite her flaws, had loved him, wanted him. Sheila had just been—he can’t pretend she hadn’t mattered, not yet, maybe not ever, but Sheila hadn’t been a mother. Jason knows that. He somehow doesn’t think that’s what Bruce means. “What?”

“After—after, I looked extensively into Sheila Haywood’s history. She was working with the Joker. She was embezzling funds from the refugee camp. Before she had left Gotham she had made a significant amount of money trafficking unwanted children to wealthy families willing to look the other way.”

Bruce walks over to the computer, which had seemed so important minutes ago, which seems so much less now. It’s different, like everything else, nine screens instead of six, all of them larger, brighter. Bruce presses his thumb into an indent on the keyboard, pages through several windows, and brings up a couple headshots of Sheila and what looks like a DNA profile. “I was suspicious about Sheila Hawywood, both because of her final words and because of her history. As it turns out, she wasn’t your mother.”

Bruce hesitates, and Jason walks over to look at the screen. There are tabs for Willis Todd and Catherine Johnson on the screen Bruce brought up. Oedipus, Pandora, Bluebeard’s wives. He has to know.

“You profiled all three.”

“Yes. It was. A challenge, for Catherine and for Todd. Catherine especially, since she was cremated, but I was able to cross-reference their DNA profiles with enough—”

“Bruce, I don’t give a shit about that. What did you find?”

“I confirmed that Catherine Johnson wasn’t your birth mother. And Willis Todd wasn’t your father.”

Jason eyes the chair in front of the computer. He wants to sit down. He forces himself straighter. “So who were my birth parents?”

Bruce taps a few more keys. Another DNA profile pops onto the screen. It’s all text, locus, allele, alphanumeric nonsense strings. Jason finds it hard to focus on the information, though he knows he has the ability to make sense of it. “You have genetic markers that point to mixed Pacific Islander, southeast Asian, and northern European descent. From Haywood’s operations amongst the Filipino immigrant community in Gotham, I would suggest that your birth mother was likely Filipina, probably an undocumented immigrant, but that’s conjecture. There’s no way to know.”

Jason does sit then.

You are more than the circumstances of your birth, Bruce had said earlier today. What bullshit. What absolute fucking bullshit.